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I really don't get those takes. AI is the best thing that ever happened to the Free Software world, it is basically turning any software into Free Software. You

by grumbel 13d ago

I really don't get those takes. AI is the best thing that ever happened to the Free Software world, it is basically turning any software into Free Software. You can just throw file formats, protocols or even plain binaries at the AI and it'll reverse engineer everything in a pinch. Users can finally modify software themselves, which was always the goal of the Free Software world, but very rarely happened in actuality, since it was just so damn complicated. AI lowered the barrier of entry tremendously, not just in terms of required knowledge, but especially time. Same with Creative Commons, sharing art and stuff, was a nice gesture, but rarely useful, since the level of work to modify a work to fit your project was pretty close to just doing it from scratch anyway. With AI everybody can toy around with image generators and get what they want. Is a social contract being broken? Yeah, kind of, but the problems that that contract existed to solve are no longer a thing. Creation is now easy and commodified. We finally have computer we can interact with in natural language, something people tried to do for at least 70 years and never made any significant progress on until LLM arrived. If you want to gatekeep or only create stuff to boost your own ego or portfolio, then AI might be an issue, if you actually want to build stuff, AI is godsend. We are essentially living in the StarTrek future with Holodecks and replicators and people still find reason to complain.

mosura 13d ago
> If you want to gatekeep or only create stuff to boost your own ego or portfolio, then AI might be an issue One of the major cultural problems in open source software is it got dominated by people doing it purely for self promotion. Then it becomes an interview question, then all the incentives are warped on the promise of “get PRs merged, get paid big money”. But yes, you are right.
rpdillon 13d ago
> If you want to gatekeep or only create stuff to boost your own ego or portfolio, then AI might be an issue, if you actually want to build stuff, AI is godsend. Exactly this. I've been very confused by the free software advocates that seemed to hate AI until I realized their reasons for releasing software under an open source license were very different than what I assumed they were.
- za_creature 13d ago
  While Stallman may have been originally upset about his printer, the primary motivation behind open source software is: Nothing up my sleeve. This of course requires audit and that requires that the code is written for human consumption, otherwise nobody will bother. Sure you can vibe a printer driver but how sure are you that your LLM didn't include a backdoor in the millions line of slop?
  - williamcotton 13d ago
    How sure are you that any printer driver didn’t include a backdoor? What’s the difference between the LLM code with the backdoor and the human code with the backdoor?
    - za_creature 13d ago
      The ability to audit the code. If not that, the ability to trust the reputation of the author which creates an incentive not to willingly insert a backdoor. Yes, `npm install` was always bullshit because most people didn't bother to check, which is exactly why it was exploited multiple times, which created a conversation about "supply chain security". If you want to argue that "npm changed the world" then you are correct. It did not change the world for the better though.
      - williamcotton 13d ago
        Why is LLM code always harder to audit? So LLMs might decide to add backdoors without prompting?
        za_creature 13d ago
        I'm less worried about what LLMs decide and more about what their system prompts tell them to do.
  - rpdillon 13d ago
    Trusting software produced by others is not a new problem; I consider AI to be a tool, and so my techniques for establishing trust are the same as they have always been. I look at the person wielding the tool.
ssl232 13d ago
Isn’t the problem though that AI companies charge money for their models trained on open source and copyleft projects?
- TeMPOraL 13d ago
  It's not a real problem. It's one of the most honest business models currently employed by tech companies - simple exchange of money for value. Training wasn't free and only few players on the planet had enough capital to perform it. Serving isn't free, it costs electricity (and maintenance). The companies that trained the models, and companies that serve inference, have all created real value at their own expense, and they're (for now) charging very little for it. The value users get from inference - that no one is even capturing right now, it's literally left on the table and goes 100% to the users. Contrast that with most other businesses - tech or otherwise - where there's always strings and trickery attached to any transaction.
  - za_creature 13d ago
    While I agree with you regarding shady business practices, you're very conveniently skipping over the fact that open source licenses _REQUIRE_ attribution.
    - andsoitis 13d ago
      > While I agree with you regarding shady business practices, you're very conveniently skipping over the fact that open source licenses _REQUIRE_ attribution. When you use the code as is or create a derivative work. The knowledge embodied by the code and encapsulated in an LLM doesn't strike me as needing to give attribution because the code the LLM would product doesn't match any particular open source code base. At least that's my thinking. I'd be curious to see an example where you think attribution is necessary and how you would actually do it given an output from an LLM.
      - za_creature 13d ago
        I answered here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49775387 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49775387 I will continue to hold that position until such a time that we get a better answer than: > we cannot rule out that de-identified data derived from their usage of our products helped improve our models
killerstorm 13d ago
I'd say this social contract which got "broken" never existed in the first place. Even before AI we heard lots of complaints like "I made a popular open source library which is now used by corps with trillion-dollar market cap and I don't get anything out of it; halp". There was always some kind of a conflict, now the nature of the conflict just changed
- Forgeties79 13d ago
  If by “nature“ you mean the scale, which has expanded by orders of magnitude and functionally changes the problem.
- mitxela 13d ago
  If they made it MIT, they explicitly disavowed the GPL social contract.
Forgeties79 13d ago
It’s so amazing for the free software world yet every month I see another major community or project shutter out of sheer frustration because they cannot handle the number of people dumping their garbage “improvements” and ideas that their LLM spat out in 30min. It’s not right that so many maintainers are being chastised for not wanting to comb through everyone’s bloated, rickety code. This extends beyond software. Nobody proofreads or otherwise edits what comes out. They dump it on the rest of us and demand that we thank them for their “effort.” It’s selfish behavior.
r053bud 13d ago
None of your arguments hold any water if big-corpo AI restricts open-weight models - which they very clearly want to do. AI is NOT “the best thing that ever happened to the Free Software world” if our only option is to pay a select few companies to use it.
- SuperV1234 13d ago
  We have open-source models, and they're getting better and better.
  - smitty1e 13d ago
    But, rather that a wide Edenic expanse of communication, we seem headed toward walled gardens with gatekeepers and a need to pay money for all the usual reasons. This seems both inevitable, and an occasion to tout the https://www.fsf.org https://www.fsf.org
    - jasonvorhe 13d ago
      Eh? Where exactly is that a reality though? I just spent like 20$ last week on various Chinese frontier models using openrouter and ppq building like 10 different projects that would've cost way more than double or quadruple per token at the big 3 if I didn't have those alternative options. Hell, for small tasks I even fell back to a local 27b Qwen model.
      - hackmetothemoon 12d ago
        [dead]
  - nycdotnet 13d ago
    for now.
    - TeMPOraL 13d ago
      They will literally never get worse. It's a one-way street.
ciupicri 13d ago
> Users can finally modify software themselves Right... I bet Microsoft wouldn't mind at all if I modify Windows or Office.
- Pannoniae 13d ago
  It doesn't matter if they mind or not, the question is whether they can feasibly stop you. So far, the answer seems to be "not really".
  - usewik 13d ago
    Good point. The other corollary is: why would you want to, if you can solve your problem by more easily finding and reusing existing building blocks with a bit of glue code.
  - gspr 13d ago
    They can just change their EULA to make the act akin to old fashioned piracy. The free software movement eschews such instruments by definition, so we're fucked.
    - Pannoniae 13d ago
      I mean, they can write anything in their EULA, I'm talking about enforcement. Sure, most free software advocates are squeamish about good old fashioned piracy today but I don't think that's an immutable fact of life. The best anyone can do is send takedowns to GitHub / other websites hosting the code or downloads but it's trivial to upload them to random russian code forges or whatever.
  - layer8 13d ago
    It’s become pretty difficult in some areas due to cryptographic signatures that are either bound to the hardware or to online services. Apple has feasibly stopped any modifications of iOS and their apps, for all practical purposes. These kinds of ecosystems will only continue to expand and to displace more open ones. We’re already at the point where arguably the most performant non-server hardware (Macs with the latest SoCs) is bound to a proprietary OS. Efforts like Asahi can easily be shut down by Apple with newer hardware. LLMs are no help against proper cryptographic lockdown.
tikotus 13d ago
I get kicks out of developing novel solutions to unsolved problems. I might be wrong, but I like to think it's the kind of stuf LLMs are not yet great at. Call me selfish, but I now have absolutely zero interest in sharing my findings with the world because of LLMs, since once I do, LLM companies can start selling my work. LLMs evened the battlefield for all that has been developed so far, but what about future discoveries? I think it remains to be seen if LLMs can come up with these novel solutions rendering innovators useless. If not, then LLMs might be crippled by software becoming more closed in the future.
- nayroclade 13d ago
  Companies could take your discoveries and sell things based on your work before LLMs ever existed. What's changed?
  - sriram_malhar 13d ago
    There was a level of patent/copyright protection, there was a level of awareness of stealing, a company could be taken to a court of law. A writer of a PhD thesis could show that someone lifted huge parts of a dissertation without attribution. All that is gone.
    - intrasight 13d ago
      Patents are still a very strong protection
  - tikotus 13d ago
    They could, but I could always hope they wouldn't, and most of the time I wouldn't be disappointed. AI companies don't even have means to attribute to someone the solution they're selling.
- usewik 13d ago
  Effective use of frontier models involves "driving the build". They can't really do it themselves, human is still involved to tie break complicated tradeoffs and take on deployment, security, financial and other risks. The innovators are not becoming useless, they are offered a choice to 10x their output and speed and quality of execution. Execution still matters, it just became different.
slopinthebag 13d ago
this assumes the point of oss is purely utilitarian, which is not true for many people
pimeys 13d ago
Yes. And we should all form small social LLM servers in our neighborhoods to run Deepseek and avoid paying for American corporations. I fully agree with you.
SuperV1234 13d ago
Completely agreed. Insane how everyone's free and open-source ideals seem to disappear when they feel personally attacked or scared by a new technology.
sh3rl0ck 13d ago
Hard agree. It's easier than ever to build compatibility for more architectures and devices than ever before, to autonomously test it, and ensure UX rough edges can be rapidly iterated upon across platforms.
amelius 13d ago
Do we want humans to evolve to think more, or think less? Maybe AI is the best thing for the free software world, but not the world as a whole.
- usewik 13d ago
  Humans will evolve. Some will keep trying to think more. Many others won't. I'm not sure this is that different from previous disruptive tech in that regard. It could be that AI is the tool the world needs to solve problems the world governments have been deadlocked to solve in the past 50 years.
  - amelius 13d ago
    But does it make sense to think when you're competing with a think-tank of hundreds of agents who all are more intelligent than you AND have way more stamina. I'd like to think too that the person who can sit quietly in a room and think has an evolutionary advantage over, say, an influencer on tiktok doing silly dances, but the reality seems to be more and more that this is wishful thinking. Nerds have made themselves irrelevant.
geraneum 13d ago
The reality is that no one was gatekeeping you or anyone else from doing whatever you wanted with free software. The barriers were knowledge, understanding, expertise, and hard work, none of which AI fixes for you. The premise here is that you can accomplish what you couldn’t before without actually understanding the concepts or putting in the same effort. _There is undeniably utility in that_, but I don’t see any strong argument for why it is beneficial to free software in general. It's not even clear whether it has been a net positive or negative so far, though it is undeniably a win for the corpos. Relieving yourself of thinking and effort, whether through a machine or another human, is not the liberating force you think it is, especially when that effort isn't just grunt work, but the very process that helps you develop and grow.
- grumbel 13d ago
  > The barriers were knowledge, understanding, expertise, and hard work, none of which AI fixes for you. The biggest barrier was time, there are only 24 hours in the day and no amount of hard work or knowledge is going to change that. There are just some fundamental limits of what you can accomplish as a single person in that time. And good luck trying to find contributors who want to work for free, when they already are busy with their own projects. AI just fundamentally turns that around and gives you a whole bunch of extremely capable co-workers that you can let deal with all the problems you do not want to waste your time on and they let you focus on the stuff that actually matters to you.
  - hparadiz 13d ago
    A lot of these people didn't really care about those virtues they claim they represent. They just wanted power and control over something.
  - rafterydj 13d ago
    AI does not fundamentally turn that around, with "that" being as you say the fact that there are only 24 hours in the day and that a single person could only accomplish so much. Your mistake is one I see everywhere these days, and that is the belief that a given problem with which YOU do not want to waste your time, are actually problems which are not worth doing by anyone. When examined I think this idea is obviously wrong, and misanthropic at heart. People prioritizing different things are still valuable. The reason free software has progressed up until AI has been a combination of economic conditions and unrivalled passion on the part of the developers. The SQLite project has taken 20 years to optimize, and the creator still says there is work to be done. Contrast that career spanning work with a pattern AI encourages of builders: offload the difficult or boring parts, get something barely functional, move on to the next thing. Building like this leaves you with no more experience than you already had to begin with. As another commenter said, there is undeniable and very exciting utility in that being an option! The class of "easy pickings" in projects has widened tremendously in size. I agree with you when you say that it has the power to let you focus on the stuff that actually matters to you. Software configurability is going to be a major priority! However, and I think you'd agree since we both feel free software was and is inherently complicated, configurability of software is only useful with the knowledge of how to put it to best use, like any other tool. If we were to give a laptop with Claude to a technical layperson, would they not immediately attempt to build without taking the time to understand (for example) what a database is? And when encountering problems beyond their understanding and only expecting the AI "to fix it", would they not be turned away from the tool entirely? These problems may not matter to one who DOES understand the nature of software, but they do matter overall.
gspr 13d ago
Are you sure about this? An alternative near future is that what you're describing is used to undermine/rightswash strong copyleft free software for use in proprietary products, while owners of proprietary software (and big movie studios and record labels) start protecting themselves with EULAs forbidding ingestion of the works into LLMs. Another possibility is the one others sketched, where truly user-controlled models are legislated away. Do we really believe that Rockstar would be ok with someone feeding GTA6 to a hypothetical LLM and get a "free" reimplementation out? If that world were to come to fruition, I'd maybe buy the "best thing to happen to free software" story. Otherwise, my bets are on "complete and utter stomping of small IP rights holders in favor of giant ones". In that world, free software is in real trouble. Together with indie artists and writers. I lament how many people don't seem to take this scenario seriously.
- Pannoniae 13d ago
  They can write any EULA they want but it's not like they will be able to enforce it in a meaningful way, to be fair. You can't legislate modding away, that's like legislating piracy away, which has famously failed. Music piracy wasn't killed by banning it, it has shrunk in importance because Spotify is fairly cheap and easy. Despite that, many people do still pirate music. In the hypothetical GTA VI case, what can they do about it? Take just about any historical data leak, in pretty much zero cases anyone has been able to scrub all copies of it from the internet. There's plenty of lost media, the stuff no one cares about. But if enough people care about, it can't really be scrubbed away.
  - gspr 13d ago
    I'm so worried when the retort here is essentially "but nobody gets caught breaking the law". What have we become?
    - Pannoniae 13d ago
      Sorry, I'm just being realistic. "Whenever there's a will there's a way" and so on. People have tried to legislate all sorts of various things, even stuff like "PI = 3" without much success because they weren't viable.
bayindirh 13d ago
> ... it is basically turning any software into Free Software. And the opposite is true, as well. Many groups with deep pockets are rewriting Free Software packages with permissive licenses to kill the GPL counterparts, so the companies can sell closed source software built on the effort of thousands. So it's not all pink fluffy unicorns dancing on rainbows.
- warkdarrior 13d ago
  How does competitor softwaret kill GPL packages?
  - bayindirh 13d ago
    You implement something essential in a different programming language, tout that it's better than its GPL counterpart, and lobby for a change. For me, the biggest example is uutils. Started as a "homework", then turned into a "hobby project", then turned into a complete Rust rewrite of the GNU Coreutils. It even once touted they were planning to replace all util-linux as well. When you look into uutil org, it's a systemd-like project with tons of sub-projects. For the lobby part, the same project touts "Debian might switch, soon". Debian-developers got angry, created a pull request to remove that line from the site, it just got denied, and the maintainer lashed out "This is my site, this is my project, don't bug me". The relevant thread starts at [0]. This is not always with AI, but companies can use AI to license-wash something with a "reverse engineer this, and reimplement it in X" type of prompts. Chardet has been relicensed in a hostile manner as well [1] [2]. [0]: https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2026/06/msg00315.html https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2026/06/msg00315.html [1]: https://github.com/chardet/chardet/issues/327 https://github.com/chardet/chardet/issues/327 [2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47259177 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47259177
spacedcowboy 13d ago
> If you want to gatekeep or only create stuff to boost your own ego or portfolio, then AI might be an issue, if you actually want to build stuff, AI is godsend Couldn’t agree more. If you want an example of what an AI can help a sole (ex-)engineer build in about 6 months, how about this… (For all the below “I” is short for “I used Claude code to”) - I (https://compile-xc.org https://compile-xc.org) built a compiler for a language I call ‘xc’, similar to Objective-C but designed to be cross-platform and have less square brackets :). It can run on any of {Windows, Mac, Linux, Zynq} and produce code for any of {Windows, Mac, Linux, Zynq, WASM, iOS, Android, m68k, 6502}. It needs no host-platform tools to compile code, so for example I have a signed binary on my iPhone, written and signed entirely on Linux. The compiler currently produces code that is between 2x and 0.5x the speed of clang, which is pretty good for a nascent compiler I built (more accurately: am building) a (https://compile-xc.org/compiler/api/uxkit https://compile-xc.org/compiler/api/uxkit) cross-platform UI framework, so you can write code once, even Table-views, Outline-views, Collection-views, etc., etc and your application will bind to the platform’s native toolkit through a common programming API. The next step here is an “Interface Builder” like application I call RoCkS (for historical reasons), which lets you design the UI for {desktop, tablet, phone} to bind to the same core code, dragging connections between that core code and the UI elements for the different environments - I built (https://atari-xt.com/os https://atari-xt.com/os) XTOS for the Zynq - an OS that started with FreeRTOS and added loadable processes, dynamic linking, shared memory, paging, a boot environment that can be scripted like Linux, networking, a graphical UI based on GEM, with a hardware blitter, and HDMI output with Audio islands mixed in. The blitter owns the video memory and uses shared-memory pools to give each “virtual workstation” (GEM-speak for “view of the display”) its own retained-mode and composited graphics memory. The whole OS boots from power-on to desktop in a couple of seconds, which is the reason for making it, rather than just using Linux, I wanted that “instant-on” feeling. It runs on a Z-turn board from MyIR. - I built an Atari (6502, ANTIC, POKEY, various other chips) (https://atari-xt.com/hardware/x/ https://atari-xt.com/hardware/x/)emulator, which passes the (https://forums.atariage.com/topic/171296-acid800-an-atari-test-suite/ https://forums.atariage.com/topic/171296-acid800-an-atari-te...) Acid 800 emulation torture test, and can run games such as Ballblazer, Elektraglide and (https://0x0000ff.co.uk/mov/xt/xtos-aug-11.mov https://0x0000ff.co.uk/mov/xt/xtos-aug-11.mov)Despatch Rider. It’s integrated into XTOS, so the OS boots into the GEM-based Desktop.app (written in xc) and you can double-click an icon to launch a game. The plan is to extend that to the ST once I get past the current task, which is … I built a Reddit-like website that I plan to launch in a couple of months, written entirely in xc, both the Linux-based server and the client WASM code; the server-side is just xc code, no Apache, no scripting language, just lean-and-mean xc code handling everything from the TLS handshake to the Postgres database back-end. The main difference between (https://blewit.net/ https://blewit.net/)blewit.net and Reddit is that I don’t collect any personal information, don’t track your habits and sell your data, don’t use adverts (tracking by another name) or any of the other dark patterns social media is infested with these days. Blewit is so named because I think they did. One of the other differentiators is that I plan to support the groups with specialist helpers. You can see a selection of them at (https://blewit.net/sandbox https://blewit.net/sandbox) the blewit sandbox - things like rendered music staves from ABC notation, 3d interactive molecules structure from SMILES notation, mathml with an editor to create it, etc, etc. One last purposely-separated “helper” from the others because of its scale, is the electronic circuit editor/simulator. I introduced it [url=https://www.eevblog.com/forum/projects/circuit-simulation-for-an-online-forum/ https://www.eevblog.com/forum/projects/circuit-simulation-fo...]in the EEVBlog projects forum[/url], but no-one seemed to care [grin]. That’s a shame because I think it’s pretty cool, draw the circuit in the editor, you can create your own parts, even store them to a library, add digital logic to pins, import SPICE models, and simulate with ideal or oscilloscope-type probes. It understands transmission lines, tolerances, can run monte-carlo simulations, produce overlaid graphs for {R=1k, 4.7k, 10k} etc., I could go on. The full docs to it are in the (https://blewit.net/post/93083024324820992 https://blewit.net/post/93083024324820992) Blewit editor-information pages Overall, looking back at what using an LLM has helped me code over the last half-year or so, it is unbelievable what you can code with AI in 2026. I always used to say that I had too many ideas and not enough time to implement them, well that’s still true, but to a significantly lesser extent…
hbbio 13d ago
There are both good and aspects of the AI "revolution". Yes, it's easier than ever to create free software. But wrote just yesterday on a related impact of AI agents on open source repos: https://medium.com/@hbbio/when-software-becomes-cheap-trust-becomes-expensive-621cf347880f https://medium.com/@hbbio/when-software-becomes-cheap-trust-...
congratsmoron 13d ago
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shevy-java 13d ago
> AI is the best thing that ever happened to the Free Software world, it is basically turning any software into Free Software. I disagree. That claim makes no sense to me, but even ignoring this claim for the moment, you ignore the legal situation here. AI ultimately steal. If that can be proven in court, people and companies will be held responsible. > if you actually want to build stuff, AI is godsend. We are essentially living in the StarTrek future with Holodecks and replicators and people still find reason to complain. I don't see any argument you gave for this claim, so it seems to be a baseless claim. Besides, god does not exist and assuming AI comes only with benefits and no trade-offs, is a very naive take.
- Marha01 13d ago
  > You ignore the legal situation here. AI ultimately steal. If that can be proven in court, people and companies will be held responsible. Why should any fan on Free Software care about that? Information wants to be free.
- mitxela 13d ago
  The legal situation has been resolved: AI training doesn't transfer copyright as long as the AI isn't actually reproducing a copyrighted work. You can still violate copyright in the process of acquiring the training data. This is not speculation, this is the real outcome of the lawsuits against the AI companies.
hamdingers 13d ago
> the problems that that contract existed to solve are no longer a thing. And haven't been for a while. What good is copyright when the works can be copied at zero cost by anyone? People like this author have forgotten copyleft is a workaround for copyright and not an end unto itself.
JKCalhoun 13d ago
I try to keep an open mind to both sides of the issue, but I confess that I, personally, am finding AI liberating for both software development (and my electronics hobby). Regarding software, I am clearly in the camp of developers for whom the coding is the necessary evil to get the tool/product that I had in my mind before I began. Obviously, LLMs benefit here. As an example, lately I am diving into screen-printing and there are little tools that I want for myself—the coding to implement those looked to me like a series of hurdles that I was not going to enjoy. "Hey, Gemini, I want an optical half-toning algorithm that takes these params, outputs this…" "Python is a pain, can you rewrite it in Javascript, single-page HTML?" "A splitter for the preview, a way to toggle between 1x and Fit-To-View." A day or two later and I'm burning screens using the web front-end. And on to another tool… https://engineersneedart.com/halftone/ https://engineersneedart.com/halftone/
Marha01 13d ago
> Is a social contract being broken? Yeah, kind of, but the problems that that contract existed to solve are no longer a thing. Creation is now easy and commodified. Exactly. The reason why we have rules and laws is because they make society better. Once the law or rule no longer makes society better, it should be repealed or ignored (or perhaps new, updated rules put in its place). If, in the future, AI can easily create any digital content on par with the best human creators (and I am not talking just about software), then IP laws should be mostly repealed, since information has truly become free. I can imagine some justified, temporary IP restrictions even in such future (altrough enforcement will be very problematic), but current extensive IP laws will not survive. We are not there yet, but we might get there sooner than many people think...
bakugo 13d ago
I don't think I have ever seen anyone miss the point of free (as in freedom) software as hard as this before. I feel like this is a generational comment, similar to that one from 2007 about Dropbox. I'm going to save it in a safe place. 20 years from now, when free software is a forgotten relic of the past and all computing devices that the average person may legally own are just thin clients into some sort of AI agent in the cloud, incapable of running any unapproved code, I'm going to look back at this and have a good laugh before crying.
lezojeda 13d ago
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the_interloper 13d ago
take other people's work and sell it back to them the future is now
bagelcollie 13d ago
> …since the level of work to modify a work to fit your project was pretty close to just doing it from scratch anyway. With AI everybody can toy around with image generators and get what they want. > Creation is now easy and commodified. > If you want to gatekeep or only create stuff to boost your own ego or portfolio, then AI might be an issue, if you actually want to build stuff, AI is godsend. Reading these made me realized how much people WANT to do something without having to involve with the process of making it. The last quote is implying that the reason for having issues with AI is gatekeeping or ego, while the actual reason is creators don’t want to create stuff for absolutely nothing. That aside, one thing relatively rare in discussions about AI-facilitated creations is that while AI enables creation without skills, it also takes the need for collaboration away resulting in less creativity. You used to need a small team for a project, and every discussion would have opinions from team members with diversity in expertise and background which often sparks something novel. OR if you prefer working solo, you’d need to learn various skills to cover all fronts of the project. At one point, you possess a niche set of skills that could lead to innovation. AI takes those opportunities for something new away and replaces them with something else that already existed on the internet. Of course, not everything needs fundamental understanding, especially in the world of optimization and speed, but right now the internet is swarmed by “stuff” that everyone built using the same lego bricks and it’s become less and less interesting.
192857-122-11 13d ago
Why is this gushing illogical propaganda at the top? There are free-software-leeches and free-software-developers. Yes, the leeches here have always looked down on the producers even before AI and stole what they could.
anon-3988 13d ago
Because of this, I think that the future will be worse than proprietary, it will be API based. We will no longer own any software, but instead must call an API via the internet. Even then, it could still be reversed I suppose. But distributing binaries simply does not make any sense whatsoever as people can just reverse engineer it on a weekend.
- Pannoniae 13d ago
  In that case, wouldn't piracy shift to hacking the servers and exfiltrating the binaries/code?
  - anon-3988 12d ago
    Sure, but what are you going to do with such a binary? It is probably high distributed. For instance, i don’t think we are ever going to get any games that is not streamed. At some point, the cost of reverse engineering a binary becomes way too cheap. Frankly speaking, assembly code might as well be source code today.
archagon 13d ago
Who are you in the Free Software world to speak so confidently on behalf of the Free Software world?
whizzter 13d ago
The laws aren't 100% settled, the latest reveals of MS execs in the New York Times lawsuit (or was it the New Yorker?) that came up here the other day was quite damning. Right now, only that lawsuit seriously challanges big-AI, but _if_ they succeed then everyone who's had something ingested has a precedent to lean on for a lawsuit against the big-AI corps (and potentially by extension their users). So more worryingly for free software is that snippets that has found their way via LLM models into openly licensed projects, this could be commercial "shared source" projects that have gotten ingested or even internal tools since the AI corporations trains their models on your prompts, projects and even git histories.

by grumbel 13d ago

mosura 13d ago

> If you want to gatekeep or only create stuff to boost your own ego or portfolio, then AI might be an issue One of the major cultural problems in open source software is it got dominated by people doing it purely for self promotion. Then it becomes an interview question, then all the incentives are warped on the promise of “get PRs merged, get paid big money”. But yes, you are right.

rpdillon 13d ago

> If you want to gatekeep or only create stuff to boost your own ego or portfolio, then AI might be an issue, if you actually want to build stuff, AI is godsend. Exactly this. I've been very confused by the free software advocates that seemed to hate AI until I realized their reasons for releasing software under an open source license were very different than what I assumed they were.

za_creature 13d ago
While Stallman may have been originally upset about his printer, the primary motivation behind open source software is: Nothing up my sleeve. This of course requires audit and that requires that the code is written for human consumption, otherwise nobody will bother. Sure you can vibe a printer driver but how sure are you that your LLM didn't include a backdoor in the millions line of slop?
- williamcotton 13d ago
  How sure are you that any printer driver didn’t include a backdoor? What’s the difference between the LLM code with the backdoor and the human code with the backdoor?
  - za_creature 13d ago
    The ability to audit the code. If not that, the ability to trust the reputation of the author which creates an incentive not to willingly insert a backdoor. Yes, `npm install` was always bullshit because most people didn't bother to check, which is exactly why it was exploited multiple times, which created a conversation about "supply chain security". If you want to argue that "npm changed the world" then you are correct. It did not change the world for the better though.
    - williamcotton 13d ago
      Why is LLM code always harder to audit? So LLMs might decide to add backdoors without prompting?
      - za_creature 13d ago
        I'm less worried about what LLMs decide and more about what their system prompts tell them to do.
- rpdillon 13d ago
  Trusting software produced by others is not a new problem; I consider AI to be a tool, and so my techniques for establishing trust are the same as they have always been. I look at the person wielding the tool.

ssl232 13d ago

Isn’t the problem though that AI companies charge money for their models trained on open source and copyleft projects?

TeMPOraL 13d ago
It's not a real problem. It's one of the most honest business models currently employed by tech companies - simple exchange of money for value. Training wasn't free and only few players on the planet had enough capital to perform it. Serving isn't free, it costs electricity (and maintenance). The companies that trained the models, and companies that serve inference, have all created real value at their own expense, and they're (for now) charging very little for it. The value users get from inference - that no one is even capturing right now, it's literally left on the table and goes 100% to the users. Contrast that with most other businesses - tech or otherwise - where there's always strings and trickery attached to any transaction.
- za_creature 13d ago
  While I agree with you regarding shady business practices, you're very conveniently skipping over the fact that open source licenses _REQUIRE_ attribution.
  - andsoitis 13d ago
    > While I agree with you regarding shady business practices, you're very conveniently skipping over the fact that open source licenses _REQUIRE_ attribution. When you use the code as is or create a derivative work. The knowledge embodied by the code and encapsulated in an LLM doesn't strike me as needing to give attribution because the code the LLM would product doesn't match any particular open source code base. At least that's my thinking. I'd be curious to see an example where you think attribution is necessary and how you would actually do it given an output from an LLM.
    - za_creature 13d ago
      I answered here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49775387 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49775387 I will continue to hold that position until such a time that we get a better answer than: > we cannot rule out that de-identified data derived from their usage of our products helped improve our models

killerstorm 13d ago

I'd say this social contract which got "broken" never existed in the first place. Even before AI we heard lots of complaints like "I made a popular open source library which is now used by corps with trillion-dollar market cap and I don't get anything out of it; halp". There was always some kind of a conflict, now the nature of the conflict just changed

Forgeties79 13d ago
If by “nature“ you mean the scale, which has expanded by orders of magnitude and functionally changes the problem.
mitxela 13d ago
If they made it MIT, they explicitly disavowed the GPL social contract.

Forgeties79 13d ago

It’s so amazing for the free software world yet every month I see another major community or project shutter out of sheer frustration because they cannot handle the number of people dumping their garbage “improvements” and ideas that their LLM spat out in 30min. It’s not right that so many maintainers are being chastised for not wanting to comb through everyone’s bloated, rickety code. This extends beyond software. Nobody proofreads or otherwise edits what comes out. They dump it on the rest of us and demand that we thank them for their “effort.” It’s selfish behavior.

r053bud 13d ago

None of your arguments hold any water if big-corpo AI restricts open-weight models - which they very clearly want to do. AI is NOT “the best thing that ever happened to the Free Software world” if our only option is to pay a select few companies to use it.

SuperV1234 13d ago
We have open-source models, and they're getting better and better.
- smitty1e 13d ago
  But, rather that a wide Edenic expanse of communication, we seem headed toward walled gardens with gatekeepers and a need to pay money for all the usual reasons. This seems both inevitable, and an occasion to tout the https://www.fsf.org https://www.fsf.org
  - jasonvorhe 13d ago
    Eh? Where exactly is that a reality though? I just spent like 20$ last week on various Chinese frontier models using openrouter and ppq building like 10 different projects that would've cost way more than double or quadruple per token at the big 3 if I didn't have those alternative options. Hell, for small tasks I even fell back to a local 27b Qwen model.
    - hackmetothemoon 12d ago
      [dead]
- nycdotnet 13d ago
  for now.
  - TeMPOraL 13d ago
    They will literally never get worse. It's a one-way street.

ciupicri 13d ago

> Users can finally modify software themselves Right... I bet Microsoft wouldn't mind at all if I modify Windows or Office.

Pannoniae 13d ago
It doesn't matter if they mind or not, the question is whether they can feasibly stop you. So far, the answer seems to be "not really".
- usewik 13d ago
  Good point. The other corollary is: why would you want to, if you can solve your problem by more easily finding and reusing existing building blocks with a bit of glue code.
- gspr 13d ago
  They can just change their EULA to make the act akin to old fashioned piracy. The free software movement eschews such instruments by definition, so we're fucked.
  - Pannoniae 13d ago
    I mean, they can write anything in their EULA, I'm talking about enforcement. Sure, most free software advocates are squeamish about good old fashioned piracy today but I don't think that's an immutable fact of life. The best anyone can do is send takedowns to GitHub / other websites hosting the code or downloads but it's trivial to upload them to random russian code forges or whatever.
- layer8 13d ago
  It’s become pretty difficult in some areas due to cryptographic signatures that are either bound to the hardware or to online services. Apple has feasibly stopped any modifications of iOS and their apps, for all practical purposes. These kinds of ecosystems will only continue to expand and to displace more open ones. We’re already at the point where arguably the most performant non-server hardware (Macs with the latest SoCs) is bound to a proprietary OS. Efforts like Asahi can easily be shut down by Apple with newer hardware. LLMs are no help against proper cryptographic lockdown.

tikotus 13d ago

I get kicks out of developing novel solutions to unsolved problems. I might be wrong, but I like to think it's the kind of stuf LLMs are not yet great at. Call me selfish, but I now have absolutely zero interest in sharing my findings with the world because of LLMs, since once I do, LLM companies can start selling my work. LLMs evened the battlefield for all that has been developed so far, but what about future discoveries? I think it remains to be seen if LLMs can come up with these novel solutions rendering innovators useless. If not, then LLMs might be crippled by software becoming more closed in the future.

nayroclade 13d ago
Companies could take your discoveries and sell things based on your work before LLMs ever existed. What's changed?
- sriram_malhar 13d ago
  There was a level of patent/copyright protection, there was a level of awareness of stealing, a company could be taken to a court of law. A writer of a PhD thesis could show that someone lifted huge parts of a dissertation without attribution. All that is gone.
  - intrasight 13d ago
    Patents are still a very strong protection
- tikotus 13d ago
  They could, but I could always hope they wouldn't, and most of the time I wouldn't be disappointed. AI companies don't even have means to attribute to someone the solution they're selling.
usewik 13d ago
Effective use of frontier models involves "driving the build". They can't really do it themselves, human is still involved to tie break complicated tradeoffs and take on deployment, security, financial and other risks. The innovators are not becoming useless, they are offered a choice to 10x their output and speed and quality of execution. Execution still matters, it just became different.

slopinthebag 13d ago

this assumes the point of oss is purely utilitarian, which is not true for many people

pimeys 13d ago

Yes. And we should all form small social LLM servers in our neighborhoods to run Deepseek and avoid paying for American corporations. I fully agree with you.

SuperV1234 13d ago

Completely agreed. Insane how everyone's free and open-source ideals seem to disappear when they feel personally attacked or scared by a new technology.

sh3rl0ck 13d ago

Hard agree. It's easier than ever to build compatibility for more architectures and devices than ever before, to autonomously test it, and ensure UX rough edges can be rapidly iterated upon across platforms.

amelius 13d ago

Do we want humans to evolve to think more, or think less? Maybe AI is the best thing for the free software world, but not the world as a whole.

usewik 13d ago
Humans will evolve. Some will keep trying to think more. Many others won't. I'm not sure this is that different from previous disruptive tech in that regard. It could be that AI is the tool the world needs to solve problems the world governments have been deadlocked to solve in the past 50 years.
- amelius 13d ago
  But does it make sense to think when you're competing with a think-tank of hundreds of agents who all are more intelligent than you AND have way more stamina. I'd like to think too that the person who can sit quietly in a room and think has an evolutionary advantage over, say, an influencer on tiktok doing silly dances, but the reality seems to be more and more that this is wishful thinking. Nerds have made themselves irrelevant.

geraneum 13d ago

The reality is that no one was gatekeeping you or anyone else from doing whatever you wanted with free software. The barriers were knowledge, understanding, expertise, and hard work, none of which AI fixes for you. The premise here is that you can accomplish what you couldn’t before without actually understanding the concepts or putting in the same effort. _There is undeniably utility in that_, but I don’t see any strong argument for why it is beneficial to free software in general. It's not even clear whether it has been a net positive or negative so far, though it is undeniably a win for the corpos. Relieving yourself of thinking and effort, whether through a machine or another human, is not the liberating force you think it is, especially when that effort isn't just grunt work, but the very process that helps you develop and grow.

grumbel 13d ago
> The barriers were knowledge, understanding, expertise, and hard work, none of which AI fixes for you. The biggest barrier was time, there are only 24 hours in the day and no amount of hard work or knowledge is going to change that. There are just some fundamental limits of what you can accomplish as a single person in that time. And good luck trying to find contributors who want to work for free, when they already are busy with their own projects. AI just fundamentally turns that around and gives you a whole bunch of extremely capable co-workers that you can let deal with all the problems you do not want to waste your time on and they let you focus on the stuff that actually matters to you.
- hparadiz 13d ago
  A lot of these people didn't really care about those virtues they claim they represent. They just wanted power and control over something.
- rafterydj 13d ago
  AI does not fundamentally turn that around, with "that" being as you say the fact that there are only 24 hours in the day and that a single person could only accomplish so much. Your mistake is one I see everywhere these days, and that is the belief that a given problem with which YOU do not want to waste your time, are actually problems which are not worth doing by anyone. When examined I think this idea is obviously wrong, and misanthropic at heart. People prioritizing different things are still valuable. The reason free software has progressed up until AI has been a combination of economic conditions and unrivalled passion on the part of the developers. The SQLite project has taken 20 years to optimize, and the creator still says there is work to be done. Contrast that career spanning work with a pattern AI encourages of builders: offload the difficult or boring parts, get something barely functional, move on to the next thing. Building like this leaves you with no more experience than you already had to begin with. As another commenter said, there is undeniable and very exciting utility in that being an option! The class of "easy pickings" in projects has widened tremendously in size. I agree with you when you say that it has the power to let you focus on the stuff that actually matters to you. Software configurability is going to be a major priority! However, and I think you'd agree since we both feel free software was and is inherently complicated, configurability of software is only useful with the knowledge of how to put it to best use, like any other tool. If we were to give a laptop with Claude to a technical layperson, would they not immediately attempt to build without taking the time to understand (for example) what a database is? And when encountering problems beyond their understanding and only expecting the AI "to fix it", would they not be turned away from the tool entirely? These problems may not matter to one who DOES understand the nature of software, but they do matter overall.

gspr 13d ago

Are you sure about this? An alternative near future is that what you're describing is used to undermine/rightswash strong copyleft free software for use in proprietary products, while owners of proprietary software (and big movie studios and record labels) start protecting themselves with EULAs forbidding ingestion of the works into LLMs. Another possibility is the one others sketched, where truly user-controlled models are legislated away. Do we really believe that Rockstar would be ok with someone feeding GTA6 to a hypothetical LLM and get a "free" reimplementation out? If that world were to come to fruition, I'd maybe buy the "best thing to happen to free software" story. Otherwise, my bets are on "complete and utter stomping of small IP rights holders in favor of giant ones". In that world, free software is in real trouble. Together with indie artists and writers. I lament how many people don't seem to take this scenario seriously.

Pannoniae 13d ago
They can write any EULA they want but it's not like they will be able to enforce it in a meaningful way, to be fair. You can't legislate modding away, that's like legislating piracy away, which has famously failed. Music piracy wasn't killed by banning it, it has shrunk in importance because Spotify is fairly cheap and easy. Despite that, many people do still pirate music. In the hypothetical GTA VI case, what can they do about it? Take just about any historical data leak, in pretty much zero cases anyone has been able to scrub all copies of it from the internet. There's plenty of lost media, the stuff no one cares about. But if enough people care about, it can't really be scrubbed away.
- gspr 13d ago
  I'm so worried when the retort here is essentially "but nobody gets caught breaking the law". What have we become?
  - Pannoniae 13d ago
    Sorry, I'm just being realistic. "Whenever there's a will there's a way" and so on. People have tried to legislate all sorts of various things, even stuff like "PI = 3" without much success because they weren't viable.

bayindirh 13d ago

> ... it is basically turning any software into Free Software. And the opposite is true, as well. Many groups with deep pockets are rewriting Free Software packages with permissive licenses to kill the GPL counterparts, so the companies can sell closed source software built on the effort of thousands. So it's not all pink fluffy unicorns dancing on rainbows.

warkdarrior 13d ago
How does competitor softwaret kill GPL packages?
- bayindirh 13d ago
  You implement something essential in a different programming language, tout that it's better than its GPL counterpart, and lobby for a change. For me, the biggest example is uutils. Started as a "homework", then turned into a "hobby project", then turned into a complete Rust rewrite of the GNU Coreutils. It even once touted they were planning to replace all util-linux as well. When you look into uutil org, it's a systemd-like project with tons of sub-projects. For the lobby part, the same project touts "Debian might switch, soon". Debian-developers got angry, created a pull request to remove that line from the site, it just got denied, and the maintainer lashed out "This is my site, this is my project, don't bug me". The relevant thread starts at [0]. This is not always with AI, but companies can use AI to license-wash something with a "reverse engineer this, and reimplement it in X" type of prompts. Chardet has been relicensed in a hostile manner as well [1] [2]. [0]: https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2026/06/msg00315.html https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2026/06/msg00315.html [1]: https://github.com/chardet/chardet/issues/327 https://github.com/chardet/chardet/issues/327 [2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47259177 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47259177

spacedcowboy 13d ago

> If you want to gatekeep or only create stuff to boost your own ego or portfolio, then AI might be an issue, if you actually want to build stuff, AI is godsend Couldn’t agree more. If you want an example of what an AI can help a sole (ex-)engineer build in about 6 months, how about this… (For all the below “I” is short for “I used Claude code to”) - I (https://compile-xc.org https://compile-xc.org) built a compiler for a language I call ‘xc’, similar to Objective-C but designed to be cross-platform and have less square brackets :). It can run on any of {Windows, Mac, Linux, Zynq} and produce code for any of {Windows, Mac, Linux, Zynq, WASM, iOS, Android, m68k, 6502}. It needs no host-platform tools to compile code, so for example I have a signed binary on my iPhone, written and signed entirely on Linux. The compiler currently produces code that is between 2x and 0.5x the speed of clang, which is pretty good for a nascent compiler I built (more accurately: am building) a (https://compile-xc.org/compiler/api/uxkit https://compile-xc.org/compiler/api/uxkit) cross-platform UI framework, so you can write code once, even Table-views, Outline-views, Collection-views, etc., etc and your application will bind to the platform’s native toolkit through a common programming API. The next step here is an “Interface Builder” like application I call RoCkS (for historical reasons), which lets you design the UI for {desktop, tablet, phone} to bind to the same core code, dragging connections between that core code and the UI elements for the different environments - I built (https://atari-xt.com/os https://atari-xt.com/os) XTOS for the Zynq - an OS that started with FreeRTOS and added loadable processes, dynamic linking, shared memory, paging, a boot environment that can be scripted like Linux, networking, a graphical UI based on GEM, with a hardware blitter, and HDMI output with Audio islands mixed in. The blitter owns the video memory and uses shared-memory pools to give each “virtual workstation” (GEM-speak for “view of the display”) its own retained-mode and composited graphics memory. The whole OS boots from power-on to desktop in a couple of seconds, which is the reason for making it, rather than just using Linux, I wanted that “instant-on” feeling. It runs on a Z-turn board from MyIR. - I built an Atari (6502, ANTIC, POKEY, various other chips) (https://atari-xt.com/hardware/x/ https://atari-xt.com/hardware/x/)emulator, which passes the (https://forums.atariage.com/topic/171296-acid800-an-atari-test-suite/ https://forums.atariage.com/topic/171296-acid800-an-atari-te...) Acid 800 emulation torture test, and can run games such as Ballblazer, Elektraglide and (https://0x0000ff.co.uk/mov/xt/xtos-aug-11.mov https://0x0000ff.co.uk/mov/xt/xtos-aug-11.mov)Despatch Rider. It’s integrated into XTOS, so the OS boots into the GEM-based Desktop.app (written in xc) and you can double-click an icon to launch a game. The plan is to extend that to the ST once I get past the current task, which is … I built a Reddit-like website that I plan to launch in a couple of months, written entirely in xc, both the Linux-based server and the client WASM code; the server-side is just xc code, no Apache, no scripting language, just lean-and-mean xc code handling everything from the TLS handshake to the Postgres database back-end. The main difference between (https://blewit.net/ https://blewit.net/)blewit.net and Reddit is that I don’t collect any personal information, don’t track your habits and sell your data, don’t use adverts (tracking by another name) or any of the other dark patterns social media is infested with these days. Blewit is so named because I think they did. One of the other differentiators is that I plan to support the groups with specialist helpers. You can see a selection of them at (https://blewit.net/sandbox https://blewit.net/sandbox) the blewit sandbox - things like rendered music staves from ABC notation, 3d interactive molecules structure from SMILES notation, mathml with an editor to create it, etc, etc. One last purposely-separated “helper” from the others because of its scale, is the electronic circuit editor/simulator. I introduced it [url=https://www.eevblog.com/forum/projects/circuit-simulation-for-an-online-forum/ https://www.eevblog.com/forum/projects/circuit-simulation-fo...]in the EEVBlog projects forum[/url], but no-one seemed to care [grin]. That’s a shame because I think it’s pretty cool, draw the circuit in the editor, you can create your own parts, even store them to a library, add digital logic to pins, import SPICE models, and simulate with ideal or oscilloscope-type probes. It understands transmission lines, tolerances, can run monte-carlo simulations, produce overlaid graphs for {R=1k, 4.7k, 10k} etc., I could go on. The full docs to it are in the (https://blewit.net/post/93083024324820992 https://blewit.net/post/93083024324820992) Blewit editor-information pages Overall, looking back at what using an LLM has helped me code over the last half-year or so, it is unbelievable what you can code with AI in 2026. I always used to say that I had too many ideas and not enough time to implement them, well that’s still true, but to a significantly lesser extent…

hbbio 13d ago

There are both good and aspects of the AI "revolution". Yes, it's easier than ever to create free software. But wrote just yesterday on a related impact of AI agents on open source repos: https://medium.com/@hbbio/when-software-becomes-cheap-trust-becomes-expensive-621cf347880f https://medium.com/@hbbio/when-software-becomes-cheap-trust-...

congratsmoron 13d ago

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shevy-java 13d ago

> AI is the best thing that ever happened to the Free Software world, it is basically turning any software into Free Software. I disagree. That claim makes no sense to me, but even ignoring this claim for the moment, you ignore the legal situation here. AI ultimately steal. If that can be proven in court, people and companies will be held responsible. > if you actually want to build stuff, AI is godsend. We are essentially living in the StarTrek future with Holodecks and replicators and people still find reason to complain. I don't see any argument you gave for this claim, so it seems to be a baseless claim. Besides, god does not exist and assuming AI comes only with benefits and no trade-offs, is a very naive take.

Marha01 13d ago
> You ignore the legal situation here. AI ultimately steal. If that can be proven in court, people and companies will be held responsible. Why should any fan on Free Software care about that? Information wants to be free.
mitxela 13d ago
The legal situation has been resolved: AI training doesn't transfer copyright as long as the AI isn't actually reproducing a copyrighted work. You can still violate copyright in the process of acquiring the training data. This is not speculation, this is the real outcome of the lawsuits against the AI companies.

hamdingers 13d ago

> the problems that that contract existed to solve are no longer a thing. And haven't been for a while. What good is copyright when the works can be copied at zero cost by anyone? People like this author have forgotten copyleft is a workaround for copyright and not an end unto itself.

JKCalhoun 13d ago

I try to keep an open mind to both sides of the issue, but I confess that I, personally, am finding AI liberating for both software development (and my electronics hobby). Regarding software, I am clearly in the camp of developers for whom the coding is the necessary evil to get the tool/product that I had in my mind before I began. Obviously, LLMs benefit here. As an example, lately I am diving into screen-printing and there are little tools that I want for myself—the coding to implement those looked to me like a series of hurdles that I was not going to enjoy. "Hey, Gemini, I want an optical half-toning algorithm that takes these params, outputs this…" "Python is a pain, can you rewrite it in Javascript, single-page HTML?" "A splitter for the preview, a way to toggle between 1x and Fit-To-View." A day or two later and I'm burning screens using the web front-end. And on to another tool… https://engineersneedart.com/halftone/ https://engineersneedart.com/halftone/

Marha01 13d ago

> Is a social contract being broken? Yeah, kind of, but the problems that that contract existed to solve are no longer a thing. Creation is now easy and commodified. Exactly. The reason why we have rules and laws is because they make society better. Once the law or rule no longer makes society better, it should be repealed or ignored (or perhaps new, updated rules put in its place). If, in the future, AI can easily create any digital content on par with the best human creators (and I am not talking just about software), then IP laws should be mostly repealed, since information has truly become free. I can imagine some justified, temporary IP restrictions even in such future (altrough enforcement will be very problematic), but current extensive IP laws will not survive. We are not there yet, but we might get there sooner than many people think...

bakugo 13d ago

I don't think I have ever seen anyone miss the point of free (as in freedom) software as hard as this before. I feel like this is a generational comment, similar to that one from 2007 about Dropbox. I'm going to save it in a safe place. 20 years from now, when free software is a forgotten relic of the past and all computing devices that the average person may legally own are just thin clients into some sort of AI agent in the cloud, incapable of running any unapproved code, I'm going to look back at this and have a good laugh before crying.

lezojeda 13d ago

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the_interloper 13d ago

take other people's work and sell it back to them the future is now

bagelcollie 13d ago

> …since the level of work to modify a work to fit your project was pretty close to just doing it from scratch anyway. With AI everybody can toy around with image generators and get what they want. > Creation is now easy and commodified. > If you want to gatekeep or only create stuff to boost your own ego or portfolio, then AI might be an issue, if you actually want to build stuff, AI is godsend. Reading these made me realized how much people WANT to do something without having to involve with the process of making it. The last quote is implying that the reason for having issues with AI is gatekeeping or ego, while the actual reason is creators don’t want to create stuff for absolutely nothing. That aside, one thing relatively rare in discussions about AI-facilitated creations is that while AI enables creation without skills, it also takes the need for collaboration away resulting in less creativity. You used to need a small team for a project, and every discussion would have opinions from team members with diversity in expertise and background which often sparks something novel. OR if you prefer working solo, you’d need to learn various skills to cover all fronts of the project. At one point, you possess a niche set of skills that could lead to innovation. AI takes those opportunities for something new away and replaces them with something else that already existed on the internet. Of course, not everything needs fundamental understanding, especially in the world of optimization and speed, but right now the internet is swarmed by “stuff” that everyone built using the same lego bricks and it’s become less and less interesting.

192857-122-11 13d ago

Why is this gushing illogical propaganda at the top? There are free-software-leeches and free-software-developers. Yes, the leeches here have always looked down on the producers even before AI and stole what they could.

anon-3988 13d ago

Because of this, I think that the future will be worse than proprietary, it will be API based. We will no longer own any software, but instead must call an API via the internet. Even then, it could still be reversed I suppose. But distributing binaries simply does not make any sense whatsoever as people can just reverse engineer it on a weekend.

Pannoniae 13d ago
In that case, wouldn't piracy shift to hacking the servers and exfiltrating the binaries/code?
- anon-3988 12d ago
  Sure, but what are you going to do with such a binary? It is probably high distributed. For instance, i don’t think we are ever going to get any games that is not streamed. At some point, the cost of reverse engineering a binary becomes way too cheap. Frankly speaking, assembly code might as well be source code today.

archagon 13d ago

Who are you in the Free Software world to speak so confidently on behalf of the Free Software world?

whizzter 13d ago

The laws aren't 100% settled, the latest reveals of MS execs in the New York Times lawsuit (or was it the New Yorker?) that came up here the other day was quite damning. Right now, only that lawsuit seriously challanges big-AI, but _if_ they succeed then everyone who's had something ingested has a precedent to lean on for a lawsuit against the big-AI corps (and potentially by extension their users). So more worryingly for free software is that snippets that has found their way via LLM models into openly licensed projects, this could be commercial "shared source" projects that have gotten ingested or even internal tools since the AI corporations trains their models on your prompts, projects and even git histories.