>Not the end of free software - in fact that may end up flourishing with LLMs and reverse engineering and the like.

LLMs are antithetical to free software, which everyone seems to forget is as much an ethical and social movement as it is a classification of software licensing, and will be until one can examine and audit the training data of a model to exclude the possibility of including any non-free code, and until they include, document and respect the licenses for the sources they do use.

The degree to which they discourage people from actually being able to understand and modify code without an LLM also makes the code they generate implicitly nonfree. All of the freedoms of free software presuppose their utility to a human over their utility to a machine. If people aren't reading, writing and distributing code then it defeats the entire point. That's just proprietary software with extra steps.

I don't know what you call this new paradigm of vibe-coding and just not giving a damn about sources and licenses and copyright, but it isn't free software. And it's probably worth pointing out that said paradigm was created by and is most useful to corporations, not people. Using the plagiarism machine to plagiarize "the man" is still subject to the Rule of Goats[0].

[0]https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Popehat%27s+...

> LLMs are antithetical to free software, which everyone seems to forget is as much an ethical and social movement...

At the core of Free Software there is one simple kernel: the user being in control. Licensing and copyright is used to achieve that, but they're the means, not the goal. The goal is that you, the user, should be in control of your computing, not the developers of the software you are using. Hence software that is free i.e. the software not being bound by the whims of its developers.

From that perspective, IMO, LLMs are far from antithetical to Free Software exactly because they let[0] their users do whatever they want with the software and their computers. That a user can instruct their agent to take the video playback code from MPV and combine it with the UI of XBMC[1] while ensuring it runs on the Raspberry Pi 4 they have connected to their TV (that they "jailbroke" to remove the intrusive ads and other user-hostile software that they replaced with software to their liking) even if they barely have any programming knowledge themselves is a sign of software freedom.

[0] at least the user-aligned ones not bound by restrictions placed on them by their own developers, so perhaps we need a Free Models movement too or something along these lines.

[1] random example, i don't even know of XBMC uses MPV's code already, so assume it doesn't

This does seem to be the case in practice at present, but I wonder if it can be changed. AI models are happy to write you tutorials and explain code to you. And if courts are generally unwilling to enforce copyright on proprietary code that's been laundered through an LLM, so much the better!

That link goes to a nonexistent message. Didn't Popehat leave X a while ago, if he's even still a thing?