I wonder what is happening behind closed doors for these companies to be issuing such a joint letter.

Just saw on Microsoft

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/corporate-responsibility/top...

I agree with the message, but I'm not going to accept it from this particular crowd.

Microsoft, NVIDIA, Meta, Palantir, IBM...They have all been actively hostile to open source for decades, and have a history of embracing it only when convenient and profitable.

They all have the resouces to train and release frontier open weights models today, but choose not to. Some of them (like Meta) literally have these models already sitting behind closed doors.

So spare me the marketing and virtue signaling.

It makes a ton of sense to see this sort of joint effort being made by these enormous companies, but man, there's some part of me that can't help but feel grossed out knowing the best way to get the US to make the right choice is to have a handful of elite business people say it'd be bad for them.

The issue is not open weights as a whole, indeed Hegseth himself said they are important for America (if American made, presumably); the issue is Chinese models, whether open or not, and that's what's looking to be banned, and nothing in this article suggests otherwise.

> Open source did more than lower the cost of software; it created a shared foundation of knowledge on which generations of American engineers and entrepreneurs built their institutional sovereignty

Hey nvidia, what about making your full set of linux drivers open source?

I mean, I do agree that being open is important but you're hijacking the narrative here, and I suspect being open have nothing to do with any of this.

I don't personally have a horse in this race, but if you want to accurately predict the next step:

Start with the outcome you believe will be the most in line with the spirit and traditions of the open source community. This is precisely what won't happen.

It won't necessarily be the inverse. It could be, of course, but it's also likely to be a compromise between the two.

For a topical example: The companies doing "AI" layoffs aren't doing so out of a sense of having failed their staff that helped carry them so far. Often, these announcements come on the heels of record-breaking profits. They're doing it out of contempt for workers.

See https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/cory-doctoro... for Doctorow's take on centaurs vs. reverse centaurs. Broadly speaking: C-suite business leadership wants reverse centaurs. Workers want centaurs. Unless you have a union (or some other collective bargaining power structure that I'm not aware of), the C-suite calls the shots.

The same can be said of the current administration. They don't give a fuck what most of us want on any given issue. They're captured by an aggressive ideology. Their only incentive is to be able to spin their decision to make themselves look good; to posture as "strong" leadership.