FOSS is dead - long live, FOSS.

FOSS came up around the core idea of liberating software for hardware, and later on was sustained by the idea of a commodity of commons we can build on. But with LLMs we have alternative pathways/enablement for the freedoms:

Freedom 0 (Run): LLMs troubleshoot environments and guide installations, making software executable for anyone.

Freedom 1 (Study/Change): make modifications, including lowering bar of technical knowledge.

Freedom 2 (Redistribute): LLMs force redistribution by building specs and reimplementing if needed.

Freedom 3 (Improve/Distribute): Everyone gets the improvement they want.

As we can see LLM makes these freedoms more democratic, beyond pure technical capability.

For those that cared only about these 4 freedoms, LLMs enable these in spades. But those who looked additionally for business, signalling and community values of free software (I include myself in this), these were not guaranteed by FOSS, and we find ourselves figuring out how to make up for these losses.

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anthk 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

Free software apply for software made for humans, by definitions any LLM code can only have the license inherited from the previous work as it's a transformation work. In the end LLM's are just a source of legal troubles and propietary software companies will end suing each other while every pre AI libre software will be 100% legal to use.

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visarga 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

I've been saying LLMs are more open than open source for some time...

	▲	wise0wl 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		I have to disagree. LLMs have shown that the only way to participate in the new software ecosystem are through leveraging an extremely powerful position that is create, backed, and maintained through the exploitation of capital, labor, and power (political, legal, corpotate) at levels never really seen before. The model of the Cathedral and the Bazaar was not broken by LLMs but instead the entire ecosystem was changed. Now the software doesn't matter. The code doesn't matter. The hardware doesn't matter. Anyone can generate anything for anything, as long as they pay the fee. I think it can likely be argued that participation is now gated more than ever and will require usage of an LLM to keep up and maintain some kind of competition or even meager parity. Open weight models are not really a means of crossing the moat; none of the open weight models come close to the functionality, and all of them come from the same types of corporations that are releasing their models for unspecified reasons. The fact remains that the moat created by LLMs for open source software has never been larger.