It's a shame that all these companies that benefited from open source have poisoned the industry like this
- Repositories seem to mirror fine for a few weeks and stop. Pretty useless. I have a PAT token for it that does not expire, and yet it seems to claim otherwise, despite the token working elsewhere when I test it.
- Sometimes there is nothing in the logs, sometimes it's the database being locked for some reason. The only thing that uses the database is Forgejo.
- So far I haven't been able to tell if this is Forgejo, crappy SD IO on the Pi causing database locks, or Forgejo sucking at being a mirror.
Open Source and the OSI are an industry plant. Look at who sponsors it.
The monopoly hyperscaler conglomerates get free labor and use it to build the world we despise: tracking panopticons, phones we can't install things on, device attestation, browser monoculture with no adblock, etc. etc.
Google made people fall in love with BSD/MIT, and look what it did.
Just a few of the classic plays:
"That Belongs to Us Now" - (1) vendors build stuff like Elasticsearch and Redis, (2) the hyperscalers yoink it into their proprietary offerings and take all the profits, (3) original authors and their companies starve.
"Embrace, Extend, Extinguish" - (1) vendors take an open source project like KTHML or Linux and build their version, (2) they flood the market with their offering, pushing out the competitors, (3) they use anti-competitive means to get their thing in front of all eyeballs, (4) once they have marketshare, they do evil things like add tracking and remove freedoms
Open Source needs to replaced with "freedom for the people, companies must pay". Source available shareware with anti-hyperscaler teeth.
Even Richard Stallman's licenses are not strong enough. CC BY-NC-SA is better.
"Pure" Open Source is corporate welfare. It was a mistake. It enabled giants to hang us with our own rope.
I'm all for open source, most of what I do is released as MIT, almost never "Free Software", still doing the same thing since LLMs appeared, regardless of everything else.
I'm a real person, have nothing to do with OSI but willing to explain my position, as long as you take it as real opinions held by a real person, instead of going into conspiracy theory land. Ask me anything, I'll give you my honest perspective.
Is it a danger to anyone, or damaging in any way? I think not.
Can? Sure. Should? Very questionable.
I'd call your statement more "extreme" than any of the stallman's statements on software.
But our 25 year lax regulatory environment has created a world where the largest players abuse consumers and the competitive ecosystem.
Open source is one of the many strategies these companies have abused to create grave harm to our society. It's let them get further with our support and with less expenditure. It's given them an ethical smoke screen.
- Social media algorithms are the tobacco products of our century. Kids are growing up with a distorted sense of self worth, people are getting angrier and more polarized, and all of it is highly addictive - all to fuel corporate profits.
- The most popular and important computer form factor is controlled by a duopoly and we can't even own / repair / install / have rights to our devices.
- All hardware is becoming locked to device attestation, meanwhile companies are lobbying for "age verification" (read: full-on identity tracking).
- Distribution is being locked to monopolies. 92% of "URL bars" are owned by one company, and typing something into a computer goes through a bidding war protection racket.
I can go on and on about it. I shouldn't even have to. You know this.
A lot of this is because of a lack of proper competition. Since the DOJ / FTC / EU / ASEAN are being toothless (the latter are slowly waking up), the next best thing we can do is take away their open source abuse. Stop letting them use our work against us and the rest of the population.
We need more socialists in power...
Also, open source is one more justification on why we need to increase taxes on the very rich. At this point all of them have built their fortunes on it. Just like they do on the rest of public infrastructure.
Rough times out there for transparent organizations.
Same thing book writers did when the printing press brought the possibility for others to copy their books for free.
There are also other options that have been used historically but they tend to be a lot more bloody.
This is ignorant to the history of Open Source software. Software has been open long before it was subsidized by large corporations.
"Computer software was created in the early half of the 20th century.[2][3][4] In the 1950s and into the 1960s, almost all softwares were produced by academics and corporate researchers working in collaboration,[5] often shared as public-domain software." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_free_and_open-sourc...
Software then was also rather different from software now. It's not a government-funded research project these days.
+ they don’t want to pay the bandwidth costs
+ they don’t want to help train a model that might ultimately put them out of work.
I don’t personally agree that AI are taking out jobs, but I do think it’s still a reasonable concern others have so I would sympathise if that were the rationale.
I may also have a philosophical opposition to generative AI at the same time - there are plenty of environmental, societal, and intellectual-property costs that some may find unconscionable.
Then came the model trainers, ignoring the entire discourse, reasoning: "if I can download it, it's mine too use". And then basically selling the resulting tech back to the community.
Not unlike big tech extracting money from open source, but at least the latter usually (somewhat maliciously) complied with the license.
1. Many teachers don't publish, and those that do publish often still reserve their best for their students.
2. OS development sometimes operates like esoteric societies: you publish enough that people with the desire and insight become interested and engaged - both a filter and an invitation. So you can tailor the community you like.
Both depend on people really valuing these mutually-constitutive relationships.
My observation is that the generations raised on social media and gaming are happy enough with those substitutes, and view publishing their best work as a kind of self-promotion and participation in a larger, diffuse community (without a real role in governance). And they're right: expecting more personal communities now is a severely limiting factor, and AI removes most of the incentives to participate in someone else's project.
I don't want my code to be used to build proprietary software. I want code built on top of mine to respect its users. I choose the AGPL for this reason.
I also don't mind the attribution.
The LLMs don't care about all that, and do that by hogging the resources, y creating a lot of waste and pollution and disrupting society for unclear benefits. No thanks.