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submitted 1 month ago by yoasif@fedia.io to c/technology@lemmy.world

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.

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[-] vacuumflower@lemmy.sdf.org 3 points 1 month ago

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.

[-] gringoaleatorio@lemmy.world 2 points 1 month ago

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

[-] vacuumflower@lemmy.sdf.org 1 points 1 month ago

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.

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this post was submitted on 18 Dec 2025
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