I think the appearance of free software really broke the oligarch's brains.
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@petealexharris I remember when Sun decided to charge a fee for using the Sun C compiler and on mass everyone switched to using GCC practically overnight.
@ianturton
Buying your tools from the company store is so 2 centuries ago. -
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 Eh. Given the amount of times I've seen "X project used the world over by every multinational ever is badly maintained by like one dude in Nebrahoma because nobody pays for it", I'm not sure about your base argument.
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@petealexharris Eh. Given the amount of times I've seen "X project used the world over by every multinational ever is badly maintained by like one dude in Nebrahoma because nobody pays for it", I'm not sure about your base argument.
@adriano
My base argument is political. None of the corporations promising to spend literal hundreds of billions of dollars on "AI" are doing it to make tools for users to be more productive for the benefit of those users themselves. And they are essentially stealing the combined informational output of humanity to make a land grab on that productivity. If it pays off, it pays off in unthinkable wealth. Guess how I think they intend that wealth to be distributed. -
@adriano
My base argument is political. None of the corporations promising to spend literal hundreds of billions of dollars on "AI" are doing it to make tools for users to be more productive for the benefit of those users themselves. And they are essentially stealing the combined informational output of humanity to make a land grab on that productivity. If it pays off, it pays off in unthinkable wealth. Guess how I think they intend that wealth to be distributed.@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.
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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
Using it is OK. When they got caught violating copyright, which wasn't always I'll grant you, it was uncomfortable for them.With LLMs trained on huge swathes of copyrighted works without scrutiny or attribution they can do it at unprecedented scale, and with regulatory capture letting them do it, they have essentially already carried out the heist.
The only question now is whether they can fence the stolen goods and for how much.
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I agree with you. As a software developer the first thing I always did was to look to see if I could find code that did something like my current project and modify it to do what I needed. Of course I did that. It saved my time and costs for my employer.
AI coding systems are just a faster way to do the same thing. Currently they don't produce very reliable code and it is often better for me to code something from scratch. But sometimes AI saves time.
@galaxy_map @hajovonta I seriously wonder about your understanding of what an LLM is if you think that it's only 'currently'.
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See also: Wikipedia
What ever happened to Musk's "alternative" to Wikipedia?
That thing that was just wholesale theft of material from Wikipedia and elsewhere with added fascism and "free speech".
It was launched with a grand fanfare and every right minded person took one look at it before laughing at Musk some more.
@robcornelius @petealexharris It has shown to be of high quality, apparently: https://framapiaf.org/@davidrevoy/115882389651946345
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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 if I weren’t retired I’d make $$$ off repairing bad ‘ware and documentation generated by LLMs
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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 It was the same way in the early days of web development. Corporations kept pushing for more and more complications until it was no longer something individuals could code without a steep learning curve.
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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 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.
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@hajovonta @petealexharris Hasn't this shown precisely a double-standard where they get off the hook with copyright violations (didn't this already go to court in some countries? country?), whereas other situations get copyright enforced as usual.
Which isn't even new, see e.g. automated takedown systems which repeatedly benefit big players, not rights themselves nor users, e.g. Youtube's system [1] or Google Books barring access to public domain books because someone slapped a new cover to profit from an otherwise facsimile of the original [2].
[1] https://i0.wp.com/craphound.com/images/80589999nasa-mars-rover-youtube-video-copyright-3.jpg
[2] https://social.sdf.org/@njsg/111725671048972622 - fortunately it seems one of the other versions at Google Books is fully visible with no bogus copyright watermark (no idea if that has always been the case), and there's also the linked PDF. -
@petealexharris @hajovonta I don’t think your argument tracks, because the product of LLMs cannot* be copyrighted. So it’s not a way to enclose the commons.
*Based on my understanding of copyright law, but will be determined based on massive litigation.
@adamrice @petealexharris @hajovonta What copyright law is this and how does it exclude derivative works?
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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 Yeah but we'll do it again. There's already models that run locally. A lot of the datasets are free, open weights models exist, etc. But yeah, it's similar dynamic all over again.
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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 Yup. Using OpenAI’s ChatGPT in 2026 is the socioeconomic-structural equivalent of computing on an IBM mainframe in 1966.
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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 It's the least oligarch-friendly bubble ever. Perfect substitutability. If Claude becomes too expensive, you can just go to Gemini, Chatgpt, Mistral or one of the Chinese ones and continue right where you left off. You'd have a better argument if you wrote this about the virtual girlfriend usage..
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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
And that explains why Microsoft is so keen on AI too, to them it means they can go back in time to an era when they had control, when they could charge a mint for a shitty, buggy, insecure OS that kept crashing with "Fatal Exception 0E" and BSODs every time you tried to read a PDF document -
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 I sometimes wonder when they will convince governments that software will be “unsafe” unless it’s made with certain programming languages, cloud IDEs, and only running in certified clouds.
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@adriano
Using it is OK. When they got caught violating copyright, which wasn't always I'll grant you, it was uncomfortable for them.With LLMs trained on huge swathes of copyrighted works without scrutiny or attribution they can do it at unprecedented scale, and with regulatory capture letting them do it, they have essentially already carried out the heist.
The only question now is whether they can fence the stolen goods and for how much.
@petealexharris @adriano throw into the mix also the whole «supply chain» bullshit that they tried to push with questionable success through their propaganda machines (sorry, “major tech journals”). Now they're trying to get control of it by making *themselves* an essential part of the supply chain of FLOSS development through their LLM control.
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@petealexharris It's the least oligarch-friendly bubble ever. Perfect substitutability. If Claude becomes too expensive, you can just go to Gemini, Chatgpt, Mistral or one of the Chinese ones and continue right where you left off. You'd have a better argument if you wrote this about the virtual girlfriend usage..
@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 Eh. Given the amount of times I've seen "X project used the world over by every multinational ever is badly maintained by like one dude in Nebrahoma because nobody pays for it", I'm not sure about your base argument.
@adriano @petealexharris There are institutions that can support free software projects (and other public goods) that would render IP obsolete.
