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.

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.

  • yoasif@fedia.ioOP
    3·
    2 days ago

    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.

    Even if it wasn’t, it seems that they are perfectly fine with it now.

    • CosmoNova@lemmy.worldEnglish
      4·
      2 days ago

      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.

    • vacuumflower@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
      2·
      2 days ago

      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.

      • justaman123@lemmy.worldEnglish
        1·
        2 days ago

        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?

        • vacuumflower@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
          2·
          1 day ago

          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.