Comment by shirro
15 days ago
While Google are capable of being evil all on their own I wonder if the regulatory environment companies are facing around the world is contributing. It is going to lead to increasingly restricted systems with less choice for consumers.
I recently tried to install Thunderbird email on my 17 year old's phone so he could access our self-hosted email for education, jobs, government things that young adults require. After jumping through hoops with age verification it turned out not to be allowed for his age for some unfathomable reason. Increasingly content providers, app stores, os providers etc are coming under chilling industry codes here requiring age verification and age restriction. So I used f-droid so my young adult could start making applications.
What I see as freedom might look a lot like circumvention to regulators.
As all the big commercial services step into line with government codes and turn restrictions to their commercial advantage I am not sure where that leaves those of us who use FOSS software. My apps come from Flathub, arch, debian, f-droid not Apple, Google, or Microsoft stores. My devices come OS free when possible. The volunteers involved haven't participated in the development of industry codes and aren't in a position do all the compliance stuff that governments increasingly demand from tech companies. How much longer will free and open source be tolerated?
My impression is that the order of causality is the opposite. Google and similar companies are lobbying heavily for these industry codes so that app developers have no choice but to introduce the restrictions which only allow you to operate via them.
I think it is probably a bit of both.
There are some compelling reasons to regulate tech companies for the benefit of society and I often have no issue with the intention. The problem is governments invite the industry to design the regulations and it quickly turns into regulatory capture.
If vendors were to start locking out competition or further invade privacy it would upset government regulators but now they can point at another regulatory authority and claim they are forced to do these things to protect the kiddies.
> developers have no choice but to introduce the restrictions which only allow you to operate via them
ok, but what does that mean? Identification, and a fee for that service? Is this unreasonable?
What's the service when I've purchased a phone?
If they were to require subscribing and paying a fee to use their required online service to be able to use the hardware, that sounds like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tying_(commerce)
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It reminds me of the Calvin and Hobbes strip where the dad jokes that throwing out junk mail makes him a terrorist. Running your own software on your own device? That's hacker talk.
In F-Droid's case this is absolutely a regulatory reaction -- this is directly related to the DMA (and to some extent, the Epic lawsuits.) Google does not want third parties bypassing Google in any way -- which probably ties in to the whole AOSP thing.
> How much longer will free and open source be tolerated?
I don't think they have a choice. Imagine what would happen to Google if half their software stack was Oracle and the EU had backdoors in to all of the management and CEO's devices and private communication. Why not use Chat Control to verify that they are complying with the spirit of EU law? Turn on the remote microphones while they are at it too.
On one hand we can lament the death of open source. Yet, open source has never been healthier. There has never been more open source software available to use and in development. Even when in it comes to AI, the best open source models are actually really damn good, better than anything that existed roughly 12 months ago. As much as Google, Apple, and Microsoft want to force you in to their closed ecosystems they fear being locked in to their competitor's closed ecosystems even more!
This could be a 10 page comment, but yes, the regulatory environment is a real threat to open source and the open internet in general. Most of those threats have been coming from the EU, with things like Chat Control and PLD. Which is unfortunate, because the future of the free world will rest entirely with the United States (Also possible that the EU will be dissolved, the monetary union will have a very difficult time during the next financial crisis.)
On the other hand, software developers and users, have become too reliant on Android which is functionally a fake open source project now. I can't think of a stronger incentive to stop Android development than telling them you can't develop here without paying us.
Calling downloadable weights and biases open source is like calling compiled binaries open source.
It is more like the assembly dump generated from the source code with maybe some symbol information for the functions. The download licenses are also quite limited.
The full text training data isn't really shareable though. Since it is copyrighted when it comes to plebs like us reading them.