> 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

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krapp a day ago | parent [-]

LLMs don't let their users do whatever they want, users are limited to whatever the model and its training allow, because it makes the decisions based on randomness, not them. Even open weight models have the same limitation. You don't have exact control over what the LLM does, much less (using any of the popular services) its training data therefore you can't even claim that you created, much less own, that code.

And because LLMs can't be audited and can't track or respect the licenses of the software they use as sources, no software generated by an LLM respects the freedoms of Free Software.

>That a user can instruct their agent (...) even if they barely have any programming knowledge themselves is a sign of software freedom.

It isn't, because as I said, freedom presupposes knowledge. If you barely have programming knowledge and you don't understand the code an LLM generates then you can't 1) read it, 2) edit it or 3) redistribute it without an LLM. You are not exercising any freedoms in that case, you're just being a consumer of a service.

>so perhaps we need a Free Models movement too or something along these lines

I said what I think would be the minimum requirements for a model to respect free software - at the very least it should only be trained on free software, it should be provably auditable without hallucination (I don't even think this is technically feasible) and it should respect the licenses of the software it incorporates, including attribution where necessary.

Beyond that there's still the problem that training even open weight models requires expensive infrastructure making it implicitly proprietary. As long as we need data centers at all it's never going to be as free as a text editor.

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badsectoracula a day ago | parent [-]

You're looking at things from the perspective of being bound by the licenses and copyright, but as i wrote licenses are a means of getting control and giving more control within the confines of copyright. They are a means, not the goal.

LLMs, even by the limits they have from their training, can be used to give more control to their users than what they have.

Yes, being able to train an open source (not just open weight) model that is fully aligned with the user would be the best scenario, but even without that, LLMs can still give users more control over their computing than they previously had - even within the confines of current copyright laws, if they so desire.

	▲	krapp a day ago \| parent [-]
		>You're looking at things from the perspective of being bound by the licenses and copyright, but as i wrote licenses are a means of getting control and giving more control within the confines of copyright. They are a means, not the goal. Because free software as a movement depends on the existence of licenses and copyright. Without the ability to legally enforce and defend those licenses it would be completely meaningless Just as any freedom is meaningless without a means to enforce and defend it. And as LLMs don't even allow the means, they can't be useful in reaching the goal. The goal is for people to have control over their software - direct control, not control as determined by a mediator or service. >LLMs, even by the limits they have from their training, can be used to give more control to their users than what they have. We disagree on what "control" is in this context. I don't believe prompting a service to generate code you can't understand and thus can't use without that service is control over code in any meaningful sense, any more than ordering food at MacDonalds is control over the menu. >LLMs can still give users more control over their computing than they previously had - even within the confines of current copyright laws, if they so desire. They can't, because LLMs don't respect those laws. It doesn't matter what license you use, it just gets sucked into the plagiarism machine like anything else. Also, people had more control before LLMs because they didn't need to use LLMs. Knowledge is control. An empty text editor is infinitely more freeing than burning token on Claude (or whatever) will ever be.