Zuckerberg: Open Source AI Is the Path Forward

It's obvious he doesn't actually care about any of that. He just doesn't want him and his company to be tied down to Microsoft.

The oppressor will always attempt to co-opt the language of the oppressed. He's just following the standard playbook.

Corporations have learned to mimic human communication patterns to trick humans into propagating and sustaining them. Facebook here is particularly infamous for doing that at the cost of massive human suffering; Google, mutant anglerfish of a thousand "free" services that it is, does it at the cost of rendering large swathes of human knowledge inaccessible; Microsoft, as a predator of other corporations, gives us a mix of both outcomes. Apple is a bit of an outlier at this scale in that it seems to be motivated by pure greed for money, in the way one would expect of old-fashioned ideas of capitalism.

But make no mistake, "Open Source" was about exploitation from the beginning: it's about giving these ersatz emergent lifeforms inroads to colonise a space that was by and for real people, where interpersonal connections were once the main currency, to strip mine it and extract the surplus value. Without a real person on the other end of the line, when we are no longer writing and sharing software for the benefit of each other, and with the communication channel itself nowadays being interdicted and sterilised to keep people compartmentalised, that unwritten purpose for participating in FOSS has been completely undermined and perverted.

You can contribute to a billion-dollar Open Source project for years and the only thing that will so much as remember your email address is the recruiter spambot advertising fake job listings. It's a sucker's game. And becoming a militant FSF disciple won't provide relief either: it has never been as simple as libre vs proprietary. Software with an obvious master retains that power imbalance even in the presence of a "100% Vegan [A]GPLv3" sticker. Anyone who disagrees is welcome to try and get emacs and gcc to play nice together.

The core of "Free Software" can survive only if people start making an effort to reclaim it and perform some serious chemotherapy. But that is done via empathy, willpower, and clarity of purpose — with the sheer number of undesirable orbiters in FOSS who've been hypnotised to soil their pants violently upon encountering text documents asking them not to be raging bigots, others cheerleading over which alien mold spore they want to be the next master of their schemaless DB or containerization stack like a sportsball league, and a pervasive cult of "free speech" (and negative peace) that ensures the worst aspects will always grow until the rest of the room suffocates — realistically, this movement can do nothing from here on out but collapse under its own weight.

The future of free software will have to happen elsewhere, built by different people, who will be much more scrupulous who they let in.

Having skimmed the license, it reads like another "source available but don't compete with us" license, so no... neither open source as defined by the OSI nor free software as defined by the 4 freedoms. But it's also not a typical "you see nothing, you pay for the privilege of using" proprietary license. It's a BSL derivative.

So Zuck either doesn't know what open source really is, or he's being deliberately deceptive. Perhaps both. The former doesn't exclude the later. Given Zuck's & Meta's public history, it's easy to conclude this is a deliberate obfuscation and he personally doesn't care what "open source" is, only that it's another buzzword he can use. FOSS washing?

The source is available to view, and the models can be audited, but you can't exercise all the freedoms associated with FOSS. For some, that's enough. But any businesses really should beware of those wishy-washy non-compete clauses.

That. I'm surprised how much people who became rich after some commercial success [1] (Zuckerberg, Musk, ...) are erected as prophets by some media [2] no matter the topic they're talking about, no matter how many times they are proven wrong or even obviously lying to defend their personal interests.

[1] in which an unhealthy disregard for ethics and humanity was probably at least as important as their personal talent

[2] I'm not blaming LWN here, this particular article is just a blog post highlight like there are many and is on-topic for LWN.

> for the same reason we don't want open-source nuclear or biological toolkits that would allow anyone to easily build nuclear or biological weapons:

Um, the science of nukes and bioweapons is _very_ widely known. The difficulty is in the consistent production of various components at scale. Not unlike the LLMs of today. And not unlike semiconductor fabrication too, I might add.

"... empowering rogue individuals is too dangerous."

How are Facebook, Google, Microsoft and the other outfits of surveillance capitalism behaving differently from "rogue individuals"?

If anything, they are more dangerous and ruthless.

There are enough reports "out there" showing how they miss their carbon targets, exploit people in Africa in "content moderation" shops to the point of PTSD and so on.