TL;DR: The big tech AI company LLMs have gobbled up all of our data, but the damage they have done to open source and free culture communities are particularly insidious. By taking advantage of those who share freely, they destroy the bargain that made free software spread like wildfire.
So the issue is that AI strips the provenence of the open source contributors and then the output it spits out based on the data it consumed is not subject to the same open source licensing that applies to the open source projects, and these AI companies make profit from this but the open source contributors don’t see a dime. We’ll that’s kinda always been the case though, so many amazing open source projects get coopted by tech giants like Microsoft and then repackaged as proprietary software for a profit, embrace, extend, extinguish, but back then they needed a team of developers to do that, now it’s more automated I guess with AI
Copyleft software isn’t supposed to just be repackaged as proprietary, though. Permissive licenses, sure - but people know what they were signing up for (presumably) there.
I believe the discourse that the FSF has managed to spread is greatly harming for the developers and communities. They are copyleft absolutists who believe no restrictions should be imposed in the use of our code, not even to megacorps that massively profit from it with oftentimes nothing in return.
I am in the process of making a revised version of the copyfarleft Cooperative Software License with a lawyer and once its done I will switch most of my development to it, with a clear warning for any company that uses my code to fuck off (or pay me I guess).
If the code used to train LLM was released with copyleft license then there’s only way to interpret how the output should be licensed. There’s nothing absolutist about it, just how GPL and such were intended to work. If you don’t like it, don’t use it to train models.
I think you misinterpreted my comment? I mean the Free Software Foundation is copyleft absolutist, as in, they will defend that model of licensing no matter what. I agree, of course, an LLM can be trained legally with GPL code, as you say that’s how it is.
You don’t want copyleft. What you’re looking for is called “copyright”
No, its copyfarleft. Both it and copyleft USE copyright. I recommend you the Telecommunist Manifest on this topic, and you can find the stupid take of the FSF on this in here. I don’t want copyleft anymore, I don’t think it is enough. The FSF’s justification is hipocritical and coward as they state that “…embedding that desire (ethical behavior) in software license requirements will backfire, by legitimizing fundamentally unjust power over others” while using the power of copyright themselves, and in a world where we already see bad actors profiting from collective work.
Edit: Adding to this, the first word of the GNU GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE is Copyright lmao