Comment by echelon
2 days ago
Anything open source will be turned against its authors and against ICs.
We thought it would give us freedom, but all of the advantage will accrue to the hyperscalers.
If we don't build open source infra that is owned by everyone, we'll be owned by industrial giants and left with a thin crust that is barely ours. (This seems like such a far-fetched "Kumbaya, My Lord" type of wishful thinking, that it's a joke that I'm even suggesting this is possible.)
Tech is about to cease being ours.
I really like AI models, but I hate monopolies. Especially ones that treat us like cattle and depopulate the last vestiges of ownership and public commons.
it's a real shame no one warned us this would happen when a bunch of corporatists and opportunists wrested the term "open source" from the advocates of true freedom in the late '90s.
https://www.fsf.org/
But there was money to be made and the friends you thought were friends were just mercenaries with a shiv in their hand.
Also the FSF squandered its opportunity being RMS’ hobby / support organization and skipped a lot of important discussions, even before the skeevy behavior they’d been ignoring came to light. I used to donate in the 90s but … really feels like that was just flushing cash.
If my timelines are correct, the FSF ousted RMS before ChatGPT came out.
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Open source ended up disrupting the software profession; just not in the way people thought it would.
If we didn't have open source arguably developers would be more secure, way more secure, in the face of AI.
I'm just not sure how to connect this rhetoric to the facts of the source link, where a hobbyist attempted to extend some source-available code to support a new technology, and the CEO of the for-profit company who owns the license said he's not allowed to for business reasons.
You can be and I am sympathetic towards the CEO! I wouldn't accept a PR for cannibalize_my_revenue.txt either. But if we insist on analyzing the issue according to the categories you're describing, it seems undeniable that the CEO is a corporatist, and that he put an unfree license on his repository to stop people from freely modifying or redistributing it.
There were more-or-less two original spheres of OSS. There were the academics who were too "pure" and holier than thou for everyone else, and then there were commercial FOSS that OS'ed because something already reached its reasonable lifetime potential and it was cool to give away the plans to a cult classic to let it live on in some other mostly permanent, mostly released form. When OSS becomes a mindless pattern, an absolute prerequisite to investment, and/or ceases to be released without regret, resentment, and/or strings attached, then it's not cool anymore and becomes toxic.
> owned by everyone
There's no such thing. Even if on paper "everyone" has an ownership share, in practice it's going to be a relatively small number of people who actually exercise all the functions of ownership. The idea that "everyone" can somehow collectively "own" anything is a pipe dream. Ownership in practice is control--whoever controls it owns it. "Everyone" can't control anything.
> I really like AI models, but I hate monopolies. Especially ones that treat us like cattle and depopulate the last vestiges of ownership and public commons.
I would dispute whether the tech giants are "monopolies", since there's still competition between them, but that's a minor point. I agree with you that they treat individual coders like cattle--but that's because they can: because, from their standpoint, individual coders are commodities. And if automated tools, including AI models, are cheaper commodities that, from their standpoint, can do the same job, that's what they'll use. And if the end result is that whatever they're selling as end products becomes cheaper for the same functionality, then economically speaking, that's an improvement--we as coders might not like it, but we as customers are better off because things we want are cheaper.
So I'm not sure it's a consistent position to "really like AI models" but also not want the tech giants to treat you like cattle. The two things go together.
> we as customers are better off because things we want are cheaper
Why privilege that side of the equation over "we as workers"? Being a customer isn't all there is to life. I happen to spend quite a bit more time working than shopping.
> Why privilege that side of the equation
It's not a matter of "privilege". It's simple economics: if the same functionality can be provided more cheaply, that's a gain to everyone. The gain to customers is the most obvious gain, and it's what I focused on in my previous post--but it's also a gain to producers, because it frees up resources to produce other things of value. But the producers have to be willing to change how they make use of resources in order to take advantage of those opportunities.
> I happen to spend quite a bit more time working than shopping.
Then you should be a lot more worried about AI providing the same functionality you were providing as a coder, but more cheaply--because that makes you, or at least you as a coder providing that functionality, a commodity that's no longer worth its cost. So if you want to avoid being commoditized and treated like cattle, you have to change what you produce to something that AI can't do more cheaply than you can.
IMO, the only ethical and legal way to build LLMs on the entire output of all human creativity, that still respects rights and won't lead to feudalism, is conforming to the actual legal requirements of fair use that are being ignored.
According to fair use doctrine, research models would be okay. Models used in education would be okay. Models used for public betterment by the government would be okay, etc
Pie in the sky version would be that models, their output and the infrastructure they run on would be held in a public trust for everyone's benefit. They wouldn't exist without consuming all of the public's intellectual and creative labor and property, therefore they should belong to the public, for the public.
> Tech is about to cease being ours.
On the hardware side, it's bad, as well. Remote attestation is here, and the frog is just about boiled when it comes to the idea of a somewhat open and compatible PC as the platform for general computing.
It was kinda cool while it lasted, glad I got to see the early internet, but it wasn't worth it to basically sign away for my great grandchildren to be peasants or belong to some rich kid's harem.
They commoditized their complement to their hardware/infra, that being software. Good for them and the value of tech will shift to what is still scarce relatively.
Stop enabling corporations' theft and exploitation.
Don't FOSS by default, unionize, embrace solidarity, and form worker-owned co-ops that aren't run by craven/unrealistic/non-business founders if you want any sort of stability.
It does give us freedom. In fact, it arguably gives more people freedom, as non-programmers can create now simple tools to help themselves. I really don't see any way that it reduces our freedom.
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It did provide us with lots of non vendors locked products. World has been a better place because of open source.
You have no way way of knowing if that is true whatsoever.
lol the capitalist bloodsucker brigade has arrived, they're almost as bad as the entitled "open source community" bloodsuckers