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.

I don’t see the point of romanticizing the scene as preserving some “pure” hacker ethos and conflating it with FOSS.

No, but a bit more culturally mature in the sense of diversity of philosophy.

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.

So, if you just change the mood in these few sentences, you'll get what I'm trying to say.

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.

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.

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.

Designed to do that at the expense of being constrained by law and public morality.

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

Life is complex.

It's part of that FOSS I'm calling neutered and sterile.

FOSS is about following laws and making contracts that would be convenient with existing laws.

That's fine, but it's just a cultural stage, a projection of the wider idea onto our reality in its local form.

When you reduce that wider idea to FOSS with copyleft, you kill it.

Underground culture is important.