TL;DR: The big tech AI company LLMs have gobbled up all of our data, but the damage they have done to open source and free culture communities are particularly insidious. By taking advantage of those who share freely, they destroy the bargain that made free software spread like wildfire.
There are upsides.
Software freedom is usually associated with FOSS (legal and public exchange), but there’s also scene (underground exchange based on personal connections).
The latter, of course, is not quite the heaven many people have learned to believe in, with everything being a public verified project with all the source code visible and legal to use for every purpose.
But the latter also has advantages, it’s a non-neutered culture with all the old anarchist and hacker substrate.
Any heaven offered is usually a trap anyway.
I wonder if the whole purpose of promotion of FOSS by big companies was, long-term, this. Finding some way to abuse openness and collect for free the resource that becomes digital oil in the next stage, but only for those who own the foundries - computing resources for ML, that is.
I don’t see the point of romanticizing the scene as preserving some “pure” hacker ethos and conflating it with FOSS.
I’d rather use some free and open source software I can audit and trust rather than some pirated shit some company built.
FOSS creates sustainable value. Companies can build businesses around FOSS through services, support, hosting, and custom development. The scene creates nothing, they don’t promote standards, don’t think of interoperability and so on.
The internet and the very service you’re using run on open source software. The people that build them have values and I don’t think at any point they thought of creating something for LLMs to train on - that’s like the dumbest conspiracy theory I’ve read since a long time and it doesn’t even make sense timeline-wise.
The original FOSS licenses were designed to restrict corporate exploitation, not enable it (even if you have some more permissive licenses that make more sense to be used in a enterprise context), but it was promoted because it worked better and created value.
Would you say the same thing to an artist that freely shared his art and see his work copied in the output of some generative ai tool? That would be victim-blaming
No, but a bit more culturally mature in the sense of diversity of philosophy.
So, if you just change the mood in these few sentences, you’ll get what I’m trying to say.
You don’t think? I might have encountered some people you’d expect to be good. They are really not that. Let’s not conflate having values with having made contributions.
Designed to do that at the expense of being constrained by law and public morality.
Life is complex.
More culturally mature in which ways? Very curious to read anything about it.
Yes sure, but a contribution is already a statement in itself. I don’t mind if the person is “not good”. I’d be tempted to answer you by quoting you (without attempting to make it cryptic or cynical): life is indeed complex. There’s like an infinity of viewpoints on why people contribute to foss, but I think if people do, it’s because they’re getting value out of it, and as a result, the whole community does. Most foss contributors mind that.
Now if you keep alluding to deeper points without actually making them, I don’t see what I’d gain by continuing this conversation.
I think I’ve already said that.
Say, if someone is a very good programmer, that doesn’t mean they are better than a random drunk on any other subject.
But in FOSS they usually assume otherwise.
OK, it’s not scene being more mature than FOSS, it’s scene being normal and FOSS being less mature than in general.
Yes, well, that objective value direction is too a limitation. I’ve been reading one good book recently, still under impression (and probably will be for much longer). There are no good architects without bad architects, no good poetry without bad poetry, and no good contributions without bad contributions. And about usefulness for the whole community - a good system serves each and every use, not the majority use.
Similar to inclusiveness, except it’s ideological and not racial\medical.
In FOSS even something like PulseAudio or SystemD is spread by pressure. No, it really doesn’t matter which advantages they have in someone’s system of values or in all systems of values possible to describe. Only the pressure matters while it shouldn’t be there.
Even if it wasn’t, it seems that they are perfectly fine with it now.
I mean Apple and Microsoft essentially built their empires on the backs of Open Source developers who believed in a free internet. They took openly available code, altered it and put a price tag on it. Software development and by extend the internet was stolen from the public by the likes of Steve Jobs and Bill Gates.
I think it was, almost since mid-nineties. It’s very notable how the whole initial visibility of FOSS came from universities and companies. Before that FOSS projects were not particularly visible compared to the scene in its various forms. (I was born in 1996, so talking about what I didn’t see.)
GNU, for comparison, was considered that strange group of hackers somewhere out there.
I think it’s when in popular culture hackers became some sort of anarchist heroes, - from movies to Star Wars EU etc, - then that culture also became something that had to be dealt with. Doesn’t even matter if it really had such potential.
The threat was that personal computing and the scene combined are similar to the printing press, but multi-dimensional, - software, music, other art, exchange of it, - and the solution was to find the least potent branch. The branch that only aimed for exchange of gifts, public and legal and with no ideology attached (except for quasi-leftist activism somewhere around, but not too thick). And the branch that had the least amount of decentralization, obscurity and invisibility.
As a vaccine.
Can you more succinctly express your point, it got a bit muddy at the end. Are you saying they stole the least potent bit? And if you have the spoons could you elaborate?
Not “stole”, rather supported. Like authoritarian governments might support the least potent youth political group of those existing, as a spoiler.
There’s pluralism of respect and values, one might notice that FOSS doesn’t really have much of that. It’s pretty authoritarian. Just people think it’s meritocracy and shouldn’t be otherwise.
The longer I live, the more I think today’s tech is a dead end.