I really don't get those takes. AI is the best thing that ever happened to the Free Software world, it is basically turning any software into Free Software. You can just throw file formats, protocols or even plain binaries at the AI and it'll reverse engineer everything in a pinch. Users can finally modify software themselves, which was always the goal of the Free Software world, but very rarely happened in actuality, since it was just so damn complicated. AI lowered the barrier of entry tremendously, not just in terms of required knowledge, but especially time. Same with Creative Commons, sharing art and stuff, was a nice gesture, but rarely useful, since the level of work to modify a work to fit your project was pretty close to just doing it from scratch anyway. With AI everybody can toy around with image generators and get what they want.

Is a social contract being broken? Yeah, kind of, but the problems that that contract existed to solve are no longer a thing. Creation is now easy and commodified. We finally have computer we can interact with in natural language, something people tried to do for at least 70 years and never made any significant progress on until LLM arrived.

If you want to gatekeep or only create stuff to boost your own ego or portfolio, then AI might be an issue, if you actually want to build stuff, AI is godsend. We are essentially living in the StarTrek future with Holodecks and replicators and people still find reason to complain.

The reality is that no one was gatekeeping you or anyone else from doing whatever you wanted with free software. The barriers were knowledge, understanding, expertise, and hard work, none of which AI fixes for you. The premise here is that you can accomplish what you couldn’t before without actually understanding the concepts or putting in the same effort. _There is undeniably utility in that_, but I don’t see any strong argument for why it is beneficial to free software in general. It's not even clear whether it has been a net positive or negative so far, though it is undeniably a win for the corpos.

Relieving yourself of thinking and effort, whether through a machine or another human, is not the liberating force you think it is, especially when that effort isn't just grunt work, but the very process that helps you develop and grow.

None of your arguments hold any water if big-corpo AI restricts open-weight models - which they very clearly want to do. AI is NOT “the best thing that ever happened to the Free Software world” if our only option is to pay a select few companies to use it.

> If you want to gatekeep or only create stuff to boost your own ego or portfolio, then AI might be an issue, if you actually want to build stuff, AI is godsend.

Exactly this. I've been very confused by the free software advocates that seemed to hate AI until I realized their reasons for releasing software under an open source license were very different than what I assumed they were.

I'd say this social contract which got "broken" never existed in the first place.

Even before AI we heard lots of complaints like "I made a popular open source library which is now used by corps with trillion-dollar market cap and I don't get anything out of it; halp". There was always some kind of a conflict, now the nature of the conflict just changed

> If you want to gatekeep or only create stuff to boost your own ego or portfolio, then AI might be an issue

One of the major cultural problems in open source software is it got dominated by people doing it purely for self promotion. Then it becomes an interview question, then all the incentives are warped on the promise of “get PRs merged, get paid big money”.

But yes, you are right.

Isn’t the problem though that AI companies charge money for their models trained on open source and copyleft projects?

> ... it is basically turning any software into Free Software.

And the opposite is true, as well. Many groups with deep pockets are rewriting Free Software packages with permissive licenses to kill the GPL counterparts, so the companies can sell closed source software built on the effort of thousands.

So it's not all pink fluffy unicorns dancing on rainbows.

> Users can finally modify software themselves

Right... I bet Microsoft wouldn't mind at all if I modify Windows or Office.

> …since the level of work to modify a work to fit your project was pretty close to just doing it from scratch anyway. With AI everybody can toy around with image generators and get what they want.

> Creation is now easy and commodified.

> If you want to gatekeep or only create stuff to boost your own ego or portfolio, then AI might be an issue, if you actually want to build stuff, AI is godsend.

Reading these made me realized how much people WANT to do something without having to involve with the process of making it. The last quote is implying that the reason for having issues with AI is gatekeeping or ego, while the actual reason is creators don’t want to create stuff for absolutely nothing.

That aside, one thing relatively rare in discussions about AI-facilitated creations is that while AI enables creation without skills, it also takes the need for collaboration away resulting in less creativity. You used to need a small team for a project, and every discussion would have opinions from team members with diversity in expertise and background which often sparks something novel. OR if you prefer working solo, you’d need to learn various skills to cover all fronts of the project. At one point, you possess a niche set of skills that could lead to innovation. AI takes those opportunities for something new away and replaces them with something else that already existed on the internet. Of course, not everything needs fundamental understanding, especially in the world of optimization and speed, but right now the internet is swarmed by “stuff” that everyone built using the same lego bricks and it’s become less and less interesting.

I try to keep an open mind to both sides of the issue, but I confess that I, personally, am finding AI liberating for both software development (and my electronics hobby).

Regarding software, I am clearly in the camp of developers for whom the coding is the necessary evil to get the tool/product that I had in my mind before I began. Obviously, LLMs benefit here.

As an example, lately I am diving into screen-printing and there are little tools that I want for myself—the coding to implement those looked to me like a series of hurdles that I was not going to enjoy.

"Hey, Gemini, I want an optical half-toning algorithm that takes these params, outputs this…" "Python is a pain, can you rewrite it in Javascript, single-page HTML?" "A splitter for the preview, a way to toggle between 1x and Fit-To-View."

A day or two later and I'm burning screens using the web front-end. And on to another tool…

https://engineersneedart.com/halftone/

The laws aren't 100% settled, the latest reveals of MS execs in the New York Times lawsuit (or was it the New Yorker?) that came up here the other day was quite damning.

Right now, only that lawsuit seriously challanges big-AI, but _if_ they succeed then everyone who's had something ingested has a precedent to lean on for a lawsuit against the big-AI corps (and potentially by extension their users).

So more worryingly for free software is that snippets that has found their way via LLM models into openly licensed projects, this could be commercial "shared source" projects that have gotten ingested or even internal tools since the AI corporations trains their models on your prompts, projects and even git histories.

Completely agreed. Insane how everyone's free and open-source ideals seem to disappear when they feel personally attacked or scared by a new technology.

Yes. And we should all form small social LLM servers in our neighborhoods to run Deepseek and avoid paying for American corporations.

I fully agree with you.

> Is a social contract being broken? Yeah, kind of, but the problems that that contract existed to solve are no longer a thing. Creation is now easy and commodified.

Exactly. The reason why we have rules and laws is because they make society better. Once the law or rule no longer makes society better, it should be repealed or ignored (or perhaps new, updated rules put in its place).

If, in the future, AI can easily create any digital content on par with the best human creators (and I am not talking just about software), then IP laws should be mostly repealed, since information has truly become free. I can imagine some justified, temporary IP restrictions even in such future (altrough enforcement will be very problematic), but current extensive IP laws will not survive.

We are not there yet, but we might get there sooner than many people think...

> the problems that that contract existed to solve are no longer a thing.

And haven't been for a while. What good is copyright when the works can be copied at zero cost by anyone?

People like this author have forgotten copyleft is a workaround for copyright and not an end unto itself.

I get kicks out of developing novel solutions to unsolved problems. I might be wrong, but I like to think it's the kind of stuf LLMs are not yet great at. Call me selfish, but I now have absolutely zero interest in sharing my findings with the world because of LLMs, since once I do, LLM companies can start selling my work.

LLMs evened the battlefield for all that has been developed so far, but what about future discoveries? I think it remains to be seen if LLMs can come up with these novel solutions rendering innovators useless. If not, then LLMs might be crippled by software becoming more closed in the future.

Hard agree.

It's easier than ever to build compatibility for more architectures and devices than ever before, to autonomously test it, and ensure UX rough edges can be rapidly iterated upon across platforms.

Because of this, I think that the future will be worse than proprietary, it will be API based. We will no longer own any software, but instead must call an API via the internet. Even then, it could still be reversed I suppose. But distributing binaries simply does not make any sense whatsoever as people can just reverse engineer it on a weekend.

There are both good and aspects of the AI "revolution". Yes, it's easier than ever to create free software.

But wrote just yesterday on a related impact of AI agents on open source repos: https://medium.com/@hbbio/when-software-becomes-cheap-trust-...

Do we want humans to evolve to think more, or think less?

Maybe AI is the best thing for the free software world, but not the world as a whole.

Why is this gushing illogical propaganda at the top? There are free-software-leeches and free-software-developers.

Yes, the leeches here have always looked down on the producers even before AI and stole what they could.

It’s so amazing for the free software world yet every month I see another major community or project shutter out of sheer frustration because they cannot handle the number of people dumping their garbage “improvements” and ideas that their LLM spat out in 30min. It’s not right that so many maintainers are being chastised for not wanting to comb through everyone’s bloated, rickety code.

This extends beyond software. Nobody proofreads or otherwise edits what comes out. They dump it on the rest of us and demand that we thank them for their “effort.” It’s selfish behavior.

take other people's work and sell it back to them

the future is now

Who are you in the Free Software world to speak so confidently on behalf of the Free Software world?

> AI is the best thing that ever happened to the Free Software world, it is basically turning any software into Free Software.

I disagree. That claim makes no sense to me, but even ignoring this claim for the moment, you ignore the legal situation here. AI ultimately steal. If that can be proven in court, people and companies will be held responsible.

> if you actually want to build stuff, AI is godsend. We are essentially living in the StarTrek future with Holodecks and replicators and people still find reason to complain.

I don't see any argument you gave for this claim, so it seems to be a baseless claim. Besides, god does not exist and assuming AI comes only with benefits and no trade-offs, is a very naive take.

> If you want to gatekeep or only create stuff to boost your own ego or portfolio, then AI might be an issue, if you actually want to build stuff, AI is godsend

Couldn’t agree more.

If you want an example of what an AI can help a sole (ex-)engineer build in about 6 months, how about this… (For all the below “I” is short for “I used Claude code to”)

- I (https://compile-xc.org) built a compiler for a language I call ‘xc’, similar to Objective-C but designed to be cross-platform and have less square brackets :). It can run on any of {Windows, Mac, Linux, Zynq} and produce code for any of {Windows, Mac, Linux, Zynq, WASM, iOS, Android, m68k, 6502}. It needs no host-platform tools to compile code, so for example I have a signed binary on my iPhone, written and signed entirely on Linux. The compiler currently produces code that is between 2x and 0.5x the speed of clang, which is pretty good for a nascent compiler

I built (more accurately: am building) a (https://compile-xc.org/compiler/api/uxkit) cross-platform UI framework, so you can write code once, even Table-views, Outline-views, Collection-views, etc., etc and your application will bind to the platform’s native toolkit through a common programming API. The next step here is an “Interface Builder” like application I call RoCkS (for historical reasons), which lets you design the UI for {desktop, tablet, phone} to bind to the same core code, dragging connections between that core code and the UI elements for the different environments

- I built (https://atari-xt.com/os) XTOS for the Zynq - an OS that started with FreeRTOS and added loadable processes, dynamic linking, shared memory, paging, a boot environment that can be scripted like Linux, networking, a graphical UI based on GEM, with a hardware blitter, and HDMI output with Audio islands mixed in. The blitter owns the video memory and uses shared-memory pools to give each “virtual workstation” (GEM-speak for “view of the display”) its own retained-mode and composited graphics memory. The whole OS boots from power-on to desktop in a couple of seconds, which is the reason for making it, rather than just using Linux, I wanted that “instant-on” feeling. It runs on a Z-turn board from MyIR.

- I built an Atari (6502, ANTIC, POKEY, various other chips) (https://atari-xt.com/hardware/x/)emulator, which passes the (https://forums.atariage.com/topic/171296-acid800-an-atari-te...) Acid 800 emulation torture test, and can run games such as Ballblazer, Elektraglide and (https://0x0000ff.co.uk/mov/xt/xtos-aug-11.mov)Despatch Rider. It’s integrated into XTOS, so the OS boots into the GEM-based Desktop.app (written in xc) and you can double-click an icon to launch a game. The plan is to extend that to the ST once I get past the current task, which is …

I built a Reddit-like website that I plan to launch in a couple of months, written entirely in xc, both the Linux-based server and the client WASM code; the server-side is just xc code, no Apache, no scripting language, just lean-and-mean xc code handling everything from the TLS handshake to the Postgres database back-end. The main difference between (https://blewit.net/)blewit.net and Reddit is that I don’t collect any personal information, don’t track your habits and sell your data, don’t use adverts (tracking by another name) or any of the other dark patterns social media is infested with these days. Blewit is so named because I think they did. One of the other differentiators is that I plan to support the groups with specialist helpers. You can see a selection of them at (https://blewit.net/sandbox) the blewit sandbox - things like rendered music staves from ABC notation, 3d interactive molecules structure from SMILES notation, mathml with an editor to create it, etc, etc.

One last purposely-separated “helper” from the others because of its scale, is the electronic circuit editor/simulator. I introduced it [url=https://www.eevblog.com/forum/projects/circuit-simulation-fo...]in the EEVBlog projects forum[/url], but no-one seemed to care [grin]. That’s a shame because I think it’s pretty cool, draw the circuit in the editor, you can create your own parts, even store them to a library, add digital logic to pins, import SPICE models, and simulate with ideal or oscilloscope-type probes. It understands transmission lines, tolerances, can run monte-carlo simulations, produce overlaid graphs for {R=1k, 4.7k, 10k} etc., I could go on. The full docs to it are in the (https://blewit.net/post/93083024324820992) Blewit editor-information pages

Overall, looking back at what using an LLM has helped me code over the last half-year or so, it is unbelievable what you can code with AI in 2026. I always used to say that I had too many ideas and not enough time to implement them, well that’s still true, but to a significantly lesser extent…

I don't think I have ever seen anyone miss the point of free (as in freedom) software as hard as this before.

I feel like this is a generational comment, similar to that one from 2007 about Dropbox. I'm going to save it in a safe place. 20 years from now, when free software is a forgotten relic of the past and all computing devices that the average person may legally own are just thin clients into some sort of AI agent in the cloud, incapable of running any unapproved code, I'm going to look back at this and have a good laugh before crying.

this assumes the point of oss is purely utilitarian, which is not true for many people

Are you sure about this?

An alternative near future is that what you're describing is used to undermine/rightswash strong copyleft free software for use in proprietary products, while owners of proprietary software (and big movie studios and record labels) start protecting themselves with EULAs forbidding ingestion of the works into LLMs.

Another possibility is the one others sketched, where truly user-controlled models are legislated away.

Do we really believe that Rockstar would be ok with someone feeding GTA6 to a hypothetical LLM and get a "free" reimplementation out? If that world were to come to fruition, I'd maybe buy the "best thing to happen to free software" story. Otherwise, my bets are on "complete and utter stomping of small IP rights holders in favor of giant ones". In that world, free software is in real trouble. Together with indie artists and writers. I lament how many people don't seem to take this scenario seriously.

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