> I have to imagine this ideology was developed with humans in mind.
Actually, you don't have to. You just want to.
N=1 but to me, LLMs are a perfect example of where the "ideology embedded into the GPL" benefits the world.
The point of Free Software isn't for developers to sort-of-but-not-quite give away the code. The point of Free Software is to promote self-sufficient communities.
GPL through its clauses, particularly the viral/forced reciprocity ones, prevents software itself from becoming an asset that can be rented, but it doesn't prevent business around software. RMS/FSF didn't make the common (among fans of OSS and Free Software) but dumb assumption that everyone wants or should be a developer - the license is structured to allow anyone to learn from and modify software, including paying a specialist to do it for them. Small-scale specialization and local markets are key for robust and healthy communities, and this is what Free Software ultimately encourages.
LLMs becoming a cheap tool for modifying or writing software, even by non-specialists (or at least people who aren't domain experts), furthers those same goals, by increasing individual and communal self-sufficiency and self-reliance.
(INB4: The fact that good LLMs are themselves owned by some multinational corps is irrelevant - much in the same way as cars are important tool for personal and communal self-sufficiently, despite being designed and manufactured by few large corporations. They're still tools ~anyone can use.)
Something can be illegal and it can be technically legal but at the same time pretty damn bad. There is the spirit and the letter of the law. They can never be in perfect agreement because as time goes bad guys tend to find new workarounds.
So either the community behaves, or the letter becomes more and more complicated trying to be more specific about what should be illegal. Now that GPL is trivially washed by asking a black box trained on GPLed code to reproduce the same thing it might be inevitable, I suppose.
> They're still tools ~anyone can use
Of course, technology itself is not evil, just like crypto or nuclear fission. In this case when we are discussing harm we are almost always talking about commercial LLM operators. However, when the technology is mostly represented by that, it doesn't seem required to add a caveat every time LLMs are mentioned.
There's hardly a good, truly fully open LLM that one can actually run on own hardware. Part of the reason is that hardly anyone, in the grand scheme of things, even has the hardware required.
(Even if someone is a techie and has the money and knows how to set up a rig, which is almost nobody on grand scale of the things, now big LLM operators make sure there are no chips left for them.)
So you can buy and own (and sell) a car, but ~anyone cannot buy and run an independent LLM (and obviously not train one). ~everyone ends up using a commercial LLM powered by some megacorp's infinite compute and scraping resources and paying that megacorp one way or another, ultimately helping them do more of the stuff that they do, like harming OSS.
LLMs spitting out GPL code seems perfectly inline with the spirit to me. The goal is to make it so that users have the freedom to make software behave in ways that suit them. Things kicked off when some printer could not be made to work correctly because of its proprietary drivers. LLMs are a huge multiplier for that: now even people who don't know how to program can customize their software! We're already approaching (or at?) the point where local agents on commodity hardware (like a few $thousand worth of GPUs, which was the nominal cost of a 90s PC) are able to make whatever changes you want given the correct feedback loops. Sounds good to me.
> The point of Free Software isn't for developers to sort-of-but-not-quite give away the code. The point of Free Software is to promote self-sufficient communities.
… that are all reliant on gatekeepers, who also decide the model ethics unilaterally, among other things.
> (INB4: The fact that good LLMs are themselves owned by some multinational corps is irrelevant - much in the same way as cars are important tool for personal and communal self-sufficiently, despite being designed and manufactured by few large corporations. They're still tools ~anyone can use.)
You’re not wrong. But wouldn’t the spirit of Free Software also apply to model weights? Or do the large corps get a pass?
FWIW I don’t have a problem with LLMs per se. Just models that are either proprietary or effectively proprietary. Oligarchy ain’t freedom :)
> > Actually, you don't have to. You just want to.
> Fair.
I don't think it's fair. That ideology was unquestionably developed with humans in mind. It happened in the 80s, and back then I don't think anyone had a crazy idea that software can think for itself and so terms "use" and "learn" can apply to it. (I mean, it's a crazy idea still, but unfortunately not to everyone.)
One can suggest that free software ideology should be expanded to include software itself in the beneficiaries of the license, not just human society. That's a big call and needs a lot of proof that software can decide things on its own, and not just do what humans tell it.
> It happened in the 80s, and back then I don't think anyone had a crazy idea that software can think for itself and so terms "use" and "learn" can apply to it. (I mean, it's a crazy idea still, but unfortunately not to everyone.)
Sure they did. It was the golden age of Science Fiction, and let's just say that the stereotype of programmers and hackers being nerds with sci-fi obsession actually had a good basis in reality.
Also those ideas aren't crazy, they're obvious, and have already been obvious back then.
> It was the golden age of Science Fiction, and let's just say that the stereotype of programmers and hackers being nerds with sci-fi obsession actually had a good basis in reality.
At worst you are trying to disparage the entire idea of open source by painting the people who championed it as idiots who cannot tell fiction from reality. At best you are making a fool of yourself. If you say that free software philosophy means "also, potential sentient software that may become a reality in 100 years" everywhere it mentions "users" and "people" you better quote some sources.
> Also those ideas aren't crazy, they're obvious, and have already been obvious back then.
Fire-breathing dragons. Little green extraterrestrial humanoids. Telepathy. All of these ideas are obvious, and have been obvious for ages. None of these things exist. Sorry to break it to you, but even if an idea is obvious it doesn't make it real.
(I'll skip over the part where if you really think chatbots are sentient like humans then you might be defending an industry that is built on mass-scale abuse of sentient beings.)
Actually, you don't have to. You just want to.
N=1 but to me, LLMs are a perfect example of where the "ideology embedded into the GPL" benefits the world.
The point of Free Software isn't for developers to sort-of-but-not-quite give away the code. The point of Free Software is to promote self-sufficient communities.
GPL through its clauses, particularly the viral/forced reciprocity ones, prevents software itself from becoming an asset that can be rented, but it doesn't prevent business around software. RMS/FSF didn't make the common (among fans of OSS and Free Software) but dumb assumption that everyone wants or should be a developer - the license is structured to allow anyone to learn from and modify software, including paying a specialist to do it for them. Small-scale specialization and local markets are key for robust and healthy communities, and this is what Free Software ultimately encourages.
LLMs becoming a cheap tool for modifying or writing software, even by non-specialists (or at least people who aren't domain experts), furthers those same goals, by increasing individual and communal self-sufficiency and self-reliance.
(INB4: The fact that good LLMs are themselves owned by some multinational corps is irrelevant - much in the same way as cars are important tool for personal and communal self-sufficiently, despite being designed and manufactured by few large corporations. They're still tools ~anyone can use.)