I think the appearance of free software really broke the oligarch's brains.
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Somehow I suspect that once they've finished stealing the entire body of human knowledge, they will *copyright* that knowledge and require anyone who wants to use any part of it to pay through the nose.
What do you think?
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I think the appearance of free software really broke the oligarch's brains. People are just giving away stuff that should be Shareholder Value? And we *can't* buy it off them and own it? People are just running a compiler whenever they like to make whatever they want without paying anyone?
The push to adopt LLM-powered code generation tools is so frenzied and desperate partly because it's a perceived solution to claw back ownership of the means of production into the Right Hands.
@petealexharris
Note: Who owns Github? -
Somehow I suspect that once they've finished stealing the entire body of human knowledge, they will *copyright* that knowledge and require anyone who wants to use any part of it to pay through the nose.
What do you think?
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Since LLM outputs can't be copyrighted, and since those tools are very good at cloning existing programs, might LLMs not actually be very bad for the software industry?
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@trademark
If a significant fraction of the global software market is captured by a handful of big players who own and trade shares of that market among themselves, your ability to move from one to the other (at your own inconvenience, risk and expense) is of no concern to any of them.@petealexharris As the technology currently stands there really is no barrier to moving in fact I do that every day when I move between the free quota of various providers. You seem to be imagining an entirely different kind of technology. A different technology may of course turn out to be problematic, please complain as soon as you can actually identify it.
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I think the appearance of free software really broke the oligarch's brains. People are just giving away stuff that should be Shareholder Value? And we *can't* buy it off them and own it? People are just running a compiler whenever they like to make whatever they want without paying anyone?
The push to adopt LLM-powered code generation tools is so frenzied and desperate partly because it's a perceived solution to claw back ownership of the means of production into the Right Hands.
@petealexharris Science fiction conventions are a century old. Wikipedia is unrelated. The gutenberg project is unrelated. AO3 is unrelated.
The internet is bigger than "free software". That's why Elizabeth Warren keeps trying to kill it: https://bsky.app/profile/dieselbrain.bsky.social/post/3mcatiujjj22h
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@petealexharris As the technology currently stands there really is no barrier to moving in fact I do that every day when I move between the free quota of various providers. You seem to be imagining an entirely different kind of technology. A different technology may of course turn out to be problematic, please complain as soon as you can actually identify it.
@trademark Please feel free to mute me if my analysis doesn't seem useful to you. Not everyone in the world needs to join every conversation with everyone else.
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@petealexharris Not sure what you mean by “appearance” but free software has been around since the late 1950s, when compilers were first passed around.
@MartyFouts
The appearance of the later wave of widely available "Free as in Freedom" software protected by copyleft licences into a growing lucrative market dominated by vendor lock-in in tools, business software and operating systems. Just to clarify what I mean. -
@trademark Please feel free to mute me if my analysis doesn't seem useful to you. Not everyone in the world needs to join every conversation with everyone else.
@petealexharris I'm arguing why you're just plain wrong. Feel free to ignore if you're just pontificating instead of wanting a discussion.
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@petealexharris Thing is, free software didn't "appear", proprietary software did. Free software came first. It's the natural state of these machines. Every decade or so they come up with some new tactic to try to overcome that but it never quite works...
@admin
Yes. Reappearance into the mainstream of a newly growing non-free software market in I think the 90s or so? -
@petealexharris but all that #LLM generated code has to be considered #GNU #GPL, because GNU General Public License code was certainly included in all the training sets. Clause 5(c) applies.
@simon_brooke the verdict is still out on that…. Only a human can hold copyright, and if a machine or animals creates something then it falls outside of the scope of copyright. Maybe.
See the case where an ape made a picture, and the person setting up the camera wasn’t deemed the copyright holder.
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_selfie_copyright_dispute
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@petealexharris I'm arguing why you're just plain wrong. Feel free to ignore if you're just pontificating instead of wanting a discussion.
@trademark
You're basically telling me I should go away and only complain about things when I agree with your interpretation and parameters for discussion. I'm trying to be patient but actually, just fuck off. -
@petealexharris I tend to see Gates' letter to the CCC in the 70s as the start of the proprietary software movement, although I'm sure there were some efforts before that...
But all this computing stuff started out in universities and government labs where making your work public was pretty typical. And the ease of sharing digital files just reinforced that. So even by 1976 when Gates wrote that letter proprietary software was already far behind.
Definitely did gain some ground in the 90s though...maybe through a combination of new users who didn't quite understand how all of this worked coupled with software being a thing you bought in a box from the store making it feel more like physical property...although I still remember a lot of sharing CDs and acquiring institutional licenses and such!
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I think the appearance of free software really broke the oligarch's brains. People are just giving away stuff that should be Shareholder Value? And we *can't* buy it off them and own it? People are just running a compiler whenever they like to make whatever they want without paying anyone?
The push to adopt LLM-powered code generation tools is so frenzied and desperate partly because it's a perceived solution to claw back ownership of the means of production into the Right Hands.
The open source movement is arguably the most potent refutation of the necessity and supremacy of profit motive in the modern world.
It is also arguably the most successful and largest-scale implementation of cooperative enterprise in history- something oft referenced in radical literature and whose possibility is denied by the oligarchs' Randian / lasseiz-faire capitalist ethos with equal zeal.
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@MartyFouts
The appearance of the later wave of widely available "Free as in Freedom" software protected by copyleft licences into a growing lucrative market dominated by vendor lock-in in tools, business software and operating systems. Just to clarify what I mean.@petealexharris Vendor lock in also dates to the late 50s. “copyleft” licensing only became possible when copyright law changed in the early 80s to allow software copyright, but even it’s 40 years old.
Interestingly, vendors actually encouraged sharing free software, through user groups like IBM Share and DEC DECUS, before the law changed.
The business software market has always been lucrative. -
I think the appearance of free software really broke the oligarch's brains. People are just giving away stuff that should be Shareholder Value? And we *can't* buy it off them and own it? People are just running a compiler whenever they like to make whatever they want without paying anyone?
The push to adopt LLM-powered code generation tools is so frenzied and desperate partly because it's a perceived solution to claw back ownership of the means of production into the Right Hands.
@petealexharris You can run an LLM that specializes in code on your own PC using open weight models without paying anyone.
So... how does that work? -
@trademark
You're basically telling me I should go away and only complain about things when I agree with your interpretation and parameters for discussion. I'm trying to be patient but actually, just fuck off.@petealexharris No, I have made a specific argument for why you are wrong. You haven't provided a counter-argument.
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@petealexharris I understand your argument, but corpos have managed to coopt and abuse and parasite libre software for decades now, just by using it without paying and without giving back. They didn't need LLMs for that.
@adriano @petealexharris No, but LLMs sure do make it easier. They launder responsibility, on top of everything else.
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@adriano @petealexharris No, but LLMs sure do make it easier. They launder responsibility, on top of everything else.
@adrienne @petealexharris True. As can be seen by the several Very Productive Programmers here who "well ethics are complicated, but I've never been this productive in my 20 year career!"
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@simon_brooke the verdict is still out on that…. Only a human can hold copyright, and if a machine or animals creates something then it falls outside of the scope of copyright. Maybe.
See the case where an ape made a picture, and the person setting up the camera wasn’t deemed the copyright holder.
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_selfie_copyright_dispute
@amszmidt @petealexharris But the monkey wasn't pasting the picture together from torn up bits of pictures made by human artists.
