alt Hacker NewsThere's an almost intergalactic level of irony in the extent to which open source has benefited giant corporations and the military at the expense of individuals, and ultimately contributed to the commercialised enclosure of software IP.
I suppose you could argue it also indirectly led to the empowerment of non-developers to create their own vibe coded solutions. But we're not quite there yet.
And the AI IP that makes that possible is still enclosed rather than open.
Replies
Don't open-weight models sort of returning the favor?
Sure, Free Software hasn't been the vehicle for societal change that RMS and others certainly hoped. I remember being flamed out in a user group for suggesting that our conference shouldn't be held in a "non-free" country such as Morocco, Turkey, or China because it's counter-productive to freedom. Very few people actually got it. But it's orthogonal to LLM trainers also using free software in "non-approved" ways.
> But we're not quite there yet.
Judging from the number of projects I've seen from people who aren't software developers, we're there enough.
> There's an almost intergalactic level of irony in the extent to which open source has benefited giant corporations and the military at the expense of individuals, and ultimately contributed to the commercialised enclosure of software IP.
Could you perhaps explain that irony a bit more explicitly?
Can you provide any examples of "commercialized enclosure of software IP" somehow backwashing into the FOSS ecosystem and closing things up that are already open?