it's a real shame no one warned us this would happen when a bunch of corporatists and opportunists wrested the term "open source" from the advocates of true freedom in the late '90s.

https://www.fsf.org/

But there was money to be made and the friends you thought were friends were just mercenaries with a shiv in their hand.

> owned by everyone

There's no such thing. Even if on paper "everyone" has an ownership share, in practice it's going to be a relatively small number of people who actually exercise all the functions of ownership. The idea that "everyone" can somehow collectively "own" anything is a pipe dream. Ownership in practice is control--whoever controls it owns it. "Everyone" can't control anything.

> I really like AI models, but I hate monopolies. Especially ones that treat us like cattle and depopulate the last vestiges of ownership and public commons.

I would dispute whether the tech giants are "monopolies", since there's still competition between them, but that's a minor point. I agree with you that they treat individual coders like cattle--but that's because they can: because, from their standpoint, individual coders are commodities. And if automated tools, including AI models, are cheaper commodities that, from their standpoint, can do the same job, that's what they'll use. And if the end result is that whatever they're selling as end products becomes cheaper for the same functionality, then economically speaking, that's an improvement--we as coders might not like it, but we as customers are better off because things we want are cheaper.

So I'm not sure it's a consistent position to "really like AI models" but also not want the tech giants to treat you like cattle. The two things go together.

Stop enabling corporations' theft and exploitation.

Don't FOSS by default, unionize, embrace solidarity, and form worker-owned co-ops that aren't run by craven/unrealistic/non-business founders if you want any sort of stability.

IMO, the only ethical and legal way to build LLMs on the entire output of all human creativity, that still respects rights and won't lead to feudalism, is conforming to the actual legal requirements of fair use that are being ignored.

According to fair use doctrine, research models would be okay. Models used in education would be okay. Models used for public betterment by the government would be okay, etc

Pie in the sky version would be that models, their output and the infrastructure they run on would be held in a public trust for everyone's benefit. They wouldn't exist without consuming all of the public's intellectual and creative labor and property, therefore they should belong to the public, for the public.

> Tech is about to cease being ours.

On the hardware side, it's bad, as well. Remote attestation is here, and the frog is just about boiled when it comes to the idea of a somewhat open and compatible PC as the platform for general computing.

It was kinda cool while it lasted, glad I got to see the early internet, but it wasn't worth it to basically sign away for my great grandchildren to be peasants or belong to some rich kid's harem.

They commoditized their complement to their hardware/infra, that being software. Good for them and the value of tech will shift to what is still scarce relatively.

It does give us freedom. In fact, it arguably gives more people freedom, as non-programmers can create now simple tools to help themselves. I really don't see any way that it reduces our freedom.

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