I love the thought, but it the thinking behind it is very utopian. It doesn't match the real world. In my experience, if a company can't make all of the profit from a thing they invest in, they simply won't invest. I wish that wasn't the case, but it's what I've seen. The C-Suite and management would rather make 100% profit from living in the dark ages compared to "just" 99% of the profit from pushing the world forward.

Fuck Vitalik Buterin.

Damn, why?

Open source can refer to MIT licensed code/projects where it can be taken, modified and redistributed as proprietary software without giving back. You can't contribute without wondering if you're doing work for a mega corp.

I would be temped to argue that doesn't go far enough. If copyleft wasn't circumvented by AI I'd argue for that.

Heh. It's a very software-centric view. Open source trivializes things that can run as software on readily available hardware, but if there's a linear relationship between cost of hardware/manufacture and results you aren't solving much of the gatekeeping. There's plenty of open source availability for a lot of stuff, from email to LLMs, that nobody self-hosts. The problem isn't the underlying reproduction rights.

I will say this, I don't care about what the author or anybody else "supports". If we should have learned something from the last decade or two is that "support" means jack shit.

I care about regulation. And just like I think education, transportation, medical patents, health care and other key resources should be fundamentally public by law, the same is true of other technologies.

I agree.

Even more broadly, politically - copyleft in general is very unpopular with people, even amongst leftists and self-identified communists who you'd think would be all about that since y'know, good of the commons and the fact that communist states literally didn't give a fuck about copyright and the literature seeing it transparently as another government method of enforcing corporate power, especially apparent today when it comes to pharmaceuticals snd the fact that capitalism needs this intellectual property monopoly as an added incentive for R&D is an issue with capitalism's broken incentive structures, not cost in and of itself or science/technology.

Few people seem to understand the power of intellectual property, and various critics of corporate technology either omit mentioning or openly defend intellectual property, despite corporations having monopolies being the reason enshittification is such a phenomenon in the first place.

It seems like a lot of arguments about the role of technology in society instead boil down to more-stuffism vs. less-stuffism, usually based on emotionally charged preference for modern aesthetics or how much they believe the noble savage/appeal to nature fallacies.

When it comes to AI for instance, anyone reasonable can see that if it's open sourced for everyone to use then it's just a simple common good like a public library, use it (responsibly) and there's no issue.

Closed source private models in use by corporations suck up the environment (which belongs to everyone) and use the capital they steal from wage workers who actually produce the things they sell to give themselves leverage over said consumers/workers and other corporations, and this is not fair to the 99%.

Picture a world where AI is good enough to where it actually provides value to use it in a good chunk of jobs, and the best AI is corporate and closed source, and they just enshittified it and jacked up the prices, but if you want to get a job, you better know how to use it well. It would mean that corpo has an enormous power over your life now and you got little choice but to pony up, and they can raise prices whenever they want and snowball that capital into more and more.

I think the reason in this instance is that a lot of artists are bourgeoisie themselves and they understand that. They may be progressive as a personality trait/gimmick/style and talk about "empathy" but they understand the material reality of things.

They had the opportunities and the room for failure necessary to go into such a high risk field, and their ultimate form of commercial success is essentially using that privilege to create intellectual property they could make money from, hence the "concerns" over "style theft" and moralist fearmongering over vaguely defined concepts like "soulless", which is usually as arbitrary as "white" for racists (not implying equivalence here).

I find generally that a lot of the anti-AI viewpoints are simple self-serving veils of bourgeoisie who's capital is threatened, no different from the culture war fearmongering about vaping, a dying grasp of the tobacco companies of old threatened by shenzen gadget slop factories.

The material reality is that digital goods are effectively infinite, copying an image isn't a crime nevermind copying a style or some such, it is transparently absurd to imply otherwise.

but it the thinking behind it is very utopian

I don’t think that’s a bad thing. Things don’t have to be realistic to be aspirational. It’s a bigger problem when people give up because improvement isn’t realistic or deemed necessary by comparison to some other factor.

Saw it a lot here. People would be all “sure our healthcare isn’t great but at least we’re not like the U.S.” as the rightwingers bit by bit enshittified the entire system.

A utopia is what we should aim for. What’s the point of anything less?

"I only eat food that's free."

I fully support open source software, but it's not feasible under the current economic system to expect everyone to exclusively contribute to open source projects.

Its my way of thinking. From the ip perspective I can see peoples argument about profits and companies but for individuals you are likely to get your stuff stolen and used by companies. I mean look at ai training. So better to deny any company trying to claim your work is thiers. Added to that is the company technology that goes to the graveyard. Open source allows ones work to be immortal. Then from the user perspective we all know how controlling and privacy invasive proprietary software is.

I think a new GPL needs to be created to account for this. Like, "any generative system using this as an input which can ever replicate this code base (even in part), must be bound to this license." People could then run overfitting analysis to see if they ever get their copyleft code out of the model. If they do, then they have grounds to sue. I'm fine with an LLM being trained on my code, but I want the four freedoms to be preserved if it is.

How the world "should" respond to the thing we care about is an actively counter-productive thing to get hung up on.

Its much important how they do respond to it, and how we can reach those who don't connect with it

(And that doesn't just lecturing people and trying to brow beat them into caring about it, which seems like the default approach for a lot of foss folks 🥲 thats the opposite or reaching people, that's alienating them)

You are allowed to charge money for open source.

Its the recipe that makes the food you're eating that would need to be publicly available and free to redistribute.

You’re allowed, but as long as anyone else can do it for free, you can’t build a business model on selling it. At most you can sell something else (support, cloud compute, some solution that makes using it easier etc.).

It's not a perfect metaphor.

Technically, according to the GPLv3 you don’t need to make the source code publically available. If you sell software with binaries then their source code must be included with it. If you’re Red Hat you can also add an additional ToS to the website that states if you buy the software you can’t freely distribute the source code you download from the website or you will be sued to oblivion.

I generally agree with the first part of your post but I feel you have a weird hang up on artists. Most artist didn't go to school for art, most artists are simply self taught.

The bare minimum cost of being an artist is a pencil and paper. And although their way of combating it with appeals to copyright is regressive. It comes from a place of desperation because at the end of the day they are laborers. And I've come to find that many tech people tend to diminish artists as laborers.

"...from email to LLMs, that nobody self-hosts"

As someone that self-hosts those things, both professionally and personally, I'm gonna have to disagree. I wish more did, but there are plenty of self-hosters out there, they just don't get headlines.

There's a difference between being realistic and being pessimistic. The latter expects any attempt to fail, while the former seeks an attainable path to a goal.

One can not attain that utopian vision without setting realistic goals. Setting your eyes on the end game without ever focusing on the path to get there is dooming yourself to failure.

Bitwarden and Cryptpad. Both open source and self hostable, yet I pay for both. paying for open source is possible.