joarxpablo

I agree that this is a crisis for FLOSS, and for the copyleft technique in particular. But in my mind projects always have some level of human contribution, and those contributions will still be copyrightable. A company copying a FLOSS project would thus have to meticulously use only parts written 100% by LLMs. Vibe coding is a spectrum (https://blog.val.town/vibe-code) and as long as you are not on the extreme end of this spectrum (and I do not believe that is a sustainable way to develop large software projects) there will always be some human input that has to be worked around; and copying is then tantamount to rewriting or refactoring the program from scratch.

It is a bit hard to quantify the FLOSS-nature of open-weight models, but technically Deepseek publishes all of their models under the MIT license (https://huggingface.co/models?license=license:mit), an FSF-approved FLOSS license.

As for case #1 I personally believe this to be the same as learning from preexisting code as individuals do. But it is of course still an open questions and as I said I accept the FSF's arguments on not accepting LLM contributions to GNU Emacs. If the scenario is #2, then all LLM outputs are by definition free software; software in the public domain is fully free. The difference is that it is not /copyleft/, and so derivative works do not also have to be free software. But that is still the case for many FLOSS licenses.

I also don't think that autocracy is more productive than democracy, but the industrial revolution is absolutely not dependent on democracy.

Imperial Germany was a practically feudal political system and yet it still managed to drive some of the most important inventions of its time and rivaled the UK and US in its economy. France under Napoleon III was by no means democratic, but had no trouble growing its economy.

More recently China has moved from an almost purely agricultural society to a fully industrialized country entirely under the auspices of an authoritarian communist party. Opening up and reform still happened under autocracy, it did not lead to any further political freedoms. The Soviet Union actually did have tremendous growth during the Great Depression but of course also stagnated after WW2 (perhaps due to its very high military spending trying to keep up with the US).

I think in general there is just a correlation between economic growth and democracy, but that they are not causally related (democracy might rather be caused by economic growth, but that is still debatable).

I think that's the wrong lesson to take. The realist approach to international relations where states are controlled from the top as you describe is more legible. Instead I agree that it's really based on interpersonal relationships, but that those relationships are between CEOs, diplomats, immigrant communities, military officers, and of course also country leaders. This illegible network is what guides actually guides policy.