> But "open source" itself is an offshoot of a more foundational movement, the Free Software movement, whose goal is to promote freedom, and whose method is ope

> But "open source" itself is an offshoot of a more foundational movement, the Free Software movement, whose goal is to promote freedom, and whose method is openness. Yeah, no. Free Software is a subset of open source software, and "Open Source" (as written) is yet another subset of open source software. No wonder people have gotten all this mixed up... Ultimately, people are right to be mad at this, but they're choosing the wrong stones to lob. It's not "FreeAI" or "FOSSAI", it's "OpenAI". Open can mean anything, and doesn't even need to correlate with the qualities of their products. > The paper's authors start by suggesting that the "open" in "open AI" is meant to imply that an "open AI" can be scratch-built by competitors (or even hobbyists), but that this isn't true. Not only is the material that "open AI" companies publish insufficient for reproducing their products, even if those gaps were plugged, the resource burden required to do so is so intense that only the largest companies could do so. This is pretty wrong too! Even "Free Software" like GPL-licensed programs don't demand a non-existent resource burden for the end-user. If you cannot run the GNU Compiler, you cannot demand the upstream send you a custom binary. That's not what Open Source means, or open source, or Free Software. > like Meta's PyTorch and Google's TensorFlow. These tools are indeed "open source," licensed under real OSS terms. But they are designed and maintained by the companies that sponsor them, and optimize for the proprietary back-ends each company offers in its own cloud. When programmers train themselves to develop in these environments, they are gaining expertise in adding value to a monopolist's ecosystem, locking themselves in with their own expertise. Sorry, you had 50+ years to cry foul over proprietary API interfaces and now we are here. Even as a FOSS super-advocate I cannot feel empathy for this author.