Do you stand for what you believe in, and find the strength to do what's right? That's turtle power.
Ex-professional software engineer, enduring software freedom proponent.
Of course, the OSI *can* run their board that way. But "can" and "should" are different things.
I bet I'm not the only one right now wishing the organization most associated with "free software" weren't having similar problems with democratic board control.
Meanwhile, I'm just going to start saying I support software that supports the rights of individuals. I don't care so much what you call it, but I care a lot how you do it.
One thing I really want people to understand: regardless of the reasons for Mozilla introducing that ridiculously broad / privacy hostile terms of service / privacy policy; and regardless of their actual intent.
You should respect yourself, and your fellow humans, enough to not put up with that level of bullshit.
You deserve technology that works for you, technology that isn't built on shifting sands, whose behaviour doesn't radically change between minor updates; software that respects you.
@osi i understand considering stakeholders to include people without a business relationship is very novel for the OSI but maybe that means you shouldn't be the org trying to define these contradictory standards with conflicting goals?
Turns out the only ones "cargo culting" are the people still using the idiom despite it not really being an apt metaphor
I love this line from @anna:
"So while the concept of software freedom doesn't resonate with me as much and as deeply as the concept of liberation — my ultimate goal is to liberate people, not technology — in the acceleration of a deep integration of technology into every single aspect of our lives, the fight for software freedom still often intersects with the fight for human rights."
You don't have to take my word for it, here's Schneier himself saying this open source AI definition is "terrible":
@jwildeboer you mention how making the training data available will just make more people spend computing resources to build the models. So we just cede that right entirely to billion dollar corporations? If we're actually concerned about that cost, maybe we should do something about it for everyone instead of twisting definitions to essentially limit that ability to tech companies only.
@jwildeboer call me dogmatic, but I guess to me it depends on whether we want words to mean things. Can something be called "open source" if the literal source material isn't openly available?
You mention 95% use cases being covered by letting it stay not open. Are you comfortable ignoring 5% of use cases, especially knowing that marginalized people have a larger share of needs outside what tech considers the norm? There's devils in the details here, but ignoring the margins around common uses for tech is often how injustice gets baked into systems by design.
They posit you can still modify (tune) the distributed models without the training source. You can also modify a binary executable without its source code. Frankly that's unacceptable if we actually care about the human beings using the software.
A key pillar of freedom as it relates to software is reproducibility. The ability to build a tool from scratch, in your own environment, with your own parameters, is absolutely indispensable to both learning how the tool works and changing the tool to better serve your needs, especially if your needs fall on the outskirts of the bell curve.
There's also the issue of auditability. If you can't run the full build process yourself, producing your own results from scratch in a trusted environment to compare with what's distributed, it becomes exponentially harder to verify any claims about how a tool supposedly works.
Without the training data, this all becomes impossible for AI models. The OSI knows this. They're choosing to ignore it for the sake of expediency for the companies paying their bills, who want to claim "open" because it sounds good while actually hiding the (largely stolen and fraudulently or non-consentually acquired) source material of their current models.
Do we want a new definition of "open source" that actively thwarts analysis and tinkering, two fundamental requirements of software that respects human beings today? Reject this nonsense.
#OpenSource #OpenSourceAI #OSI #OpenSourceInitiative #FreeSoftware #AI #GenAI #GenerativeAI
As the OSI prepares to make official its "open source AI" definition with a glaring lack of requirement that the actual source (training data) is made available, it's worth noting that their work is funded by google, meta, microsoft, salesforce, etc. What does open source even mean here if the literal source of the model isn't open? These companies are invested in making you think they're on your side while they boil the oceans to avoid paying human beings for labor.
The idea behind open source, as it grew out of the free software movement, has always been to water down software freedoms, to create something more palatable to corporate interests that *sounds* good but means very little. This continues that work for the current "gen AI" bubble. It's time to ditch open source as an ideal, and the OSI especially.
https://opensource.org/ai/drafts/the-open-source-ai-definition-1-0-rc2
#OpenSource #OpenSourceAI #OSI #OpenSourceInitiative #FreeSoftware #AI #GenAI #GenerativeAI
We've gone as far as licenses can take us. The next thing is about community and stewardship, not intellectual property and legalese.
I suspect I'm going to have cause to say that a lot this week.
Just leave Stallman behind. Stop letting them hold us back. He can be the shitty little tyrant of his sad little hill, and the rest of us can build a better future.
To be fair, the lighter was only because I couldn't find my heat gun for the shrink wrap, and by "crap" I just mean a 100Ω resistor and some jump wire. This explains the bug and fix: https://superuser.com/q/1762455
What a day. Time to order a new NAS.
Today I fixed a bug in Intel silicon affecting my geriatric NAS with a lighter and some crap I got from Radio Shack over a decade ago. 😐
I know a lot of y’all are probably reeling from that Stallman report and I’ve even seen people remarking on how no one was listening until now.
What you need to understand is that the things in that report have been known, widely, for many years. They are not “open secrets”. They are things people have actively tried to address, at significant scale, many many times. Some of those times even resulted in (brief) consequences.
The man Is like a cockroach in more ways than I care to describe and what we should all be noticing here is the how incredibly impossible it is to remove an influential white man from power and have him face real consequences. He’s not even remotely rich.
The people defending him aren’t turning a blind eye. They are actively, knowingly enabling him. And that’s not because they care about the movement…
…it’s because they know they are like him, and if he suffers consequences, they’ll be next. And that just won’t do. They don’t give a shit about a “movement” that’s basically petered out by now.
The only thing left to be done about the FSF is to write them off and move on. In the near term, fwiw I say support the Software Freedom Conservancy's efforts, and in the long term, the work is to create and support the organizations looking beyond the text of licensing to focus on the inclusivity, accessibilitiy, intersectionality, and community of software, who seek to understand the necessities and responsibilities of open participation and healthy community.
with regards to RMS. he is a creep. did some good things in the past. built the fsf around himself, not around free software; there was overlap in the past but not any more, for a decade at least, as the fsf is just an ineffective advocacy org that does no work. i no longer think about rms or his org and you should not either. shun and let wither.
