alt Hacker NewsI know I'm just one person, but I absolutely detest all of the rhetoric coming from these companies and what it means for software freedom - the FSF kind. I ABHOR the idea that free software developers have to either use the hosted (controlled) service, or go way slower than proprietary software devs.
So I'm doing what I can - I only use local models for 100% of my personal coding. (And their capability is amazing! Qwen 3.8 Flash Next leaves me wanting for nothing at this point.)
And I know open weights aren't enough. I'm ready to support open training if/when we get around to that. I hope once hardware prices ease, we can see homelabbers building small AI hosts (small by homelab standards yknow. So let's say 512GB host ram and 1-2 32GB cards, though i hope we also start to see AI cards with lots of vram but less compute cores). Then maybe we can do folding@home style distributed training.
In a time when software freedom is perhaps more threatened than ever, I'm happy to see that information still WANTS to be free, perhaps even more than ever. Look at how easy it is to distill claude! Despite, presumably, anthropic working very hard to prevent it.
Replies
Homelabbers pooling would be a very nice thing to do and I would definitely consider joining in.
It's interesting, because licensing is based on copyright, and copyright doesn't apply to AI code.
In theory, things will become even more free, because you can copy whatever code you like, it's all in the public domain because it was all written by an AI (or enough of it was that a court will decide that copying the whole code base is fair).
And the ability of AI's to reverse-engineer binaries means that even hiding the code won't be enough.
Companies may write T&Cs that try to cover some of this, but they'll still have lost the biggest protection they have.
So, in theory, we move to what the FOSS movement have always wanted: all the code available, all the time, with anyone able to change whatever they like about the software they run.
Somehow I don't think anyone is going to be happy about this, though.