But looking at the history of the free software movement, it seems like they should actually be embracing LLMs. It's interesting how differently people think.

The starting point of GNU was that Unix was expensive and costly for research labs, so they set out to build a free alternative that users could control from the ground up.

So if LLMs are useful, shouldn't we be building a free LLM ecosystem where users can run, study, and modify them, rather than letting a few companies control access to models, execution, environments, and data processing?

Of course, it's natural for organizations to drift from their original mission as they get older.

But judging by GNU's early history, the logic that:

1.LLMs themselves are bad because companies control them,

2.Writing code with AI isn't real programming,

3.Only human-written code is truly free.

This logic seems a bit flawed. After all, compilers, debuggers, and automated builds all automated tasks that humans used to do manually. And the GNU project itself created tools like Make and GDB so that programmers could work at a higher level.

If LLMs can reduce repetitive coding, documentation browsing, translation, test generation, and understanding legacy code, then that seems perfectly aligned with the next goals of free software. Making knowledge accessible to more people rather than keeping it locked up as tacit knowledge held by a few experts.

I guess when organizations grow large, they inevitably attract people who don't fully align with the original purpose

Re 3: I'm old enough to remember the SCO lawsuits against Linux. If I were running a significant free software operation, I would worry about legal liability for AI-generated code (a few years or a couple decades down the road, after copyright holders win a major case or two against the AI companies).