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>Not the end of free software - in fact that may end up flourishing with LLMs and reverse engineering and the like.

LLMs are antithetical to free software, which everyone seems to forget is as much an ethical and social movement as it is a classification of software licensing, and will be until one can examine and audit the training data of a model to exclude the possibility of including any non-free code, and until they include, document and respect the licenses for the sources they do use.

The degree to which they discourage people from actually being able to understand and modify code without an LLM also makes the code they generate implicitly nonfree. All of the freedoms of free software presuppose their utility to a human over their utility to a machine. If people aren't reading, writing and distributing code then it defeats the entire point. That's just proprietary software with extra steps.

I don't know what you call this new paradigm of vibe-coding and just not giving a damn about sources and licenses and copyright, but it isn't free software. And it's probably worth pointing out that said paradigm was created by and is most useful to corporations, not people. Using the plagiarism machine to plagiarize "the man" is still subject to the Rule of Goats[0].

[0]https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Popehat%27s+...

> 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

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.

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.

>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.

This does seem to be the case in practice at present, but I wonder if it can be changed. AI models are happy to write you tutorials and explain code to you. And if courts are generally unwilling to enforce copyright on proprietary code that's been laundered through an LLM, so much the better!

The whole culture around vibe-coding would need to be changed. As it is, many people using LLMs are proud of the fact that they never touch the code, and almost no one seems to see any value in having any direct human involvement or knowledge at all.

It would be one thing if this were only the case for professional development, or if AI were really being used as "just a tool" but it seems to be the dominant paradigm with AI everywhere, that LLMs have to "win" and all human involvement in coding has to be eliminated. A world where the dominant culture around LLMs was to actually use them for education and aiding code generation instead of entirely abrogating oneself to a black box dopamine machine would be infinitely better than the world we have.

The Zeitgeist is fickle.

Or one could realize that the whole Imaginary Property charade is rapidly headed to obsolescence. Good riddance.

You may prefer the world where everything you do is owned by one of two, maybe three AI silos but I don't.

I don't see how that is at all relevant to what I said, seems like you just wanted a strawman to Don Quixote.

OK let me spell it out for you.

Ihe whole "Imaginary Property" (cute) charade is not rapidly headed to obsolescence. LLMs will only centralize control of IP to the corporations that will run their own LLM services, or license them to the services that will generate all of "your code" in the future. And under their terms of service, anything you generate will belong to those services, and not to you.

That link goes to a nonexistent message. Didn't Popehat leave X a while ago, if he's even still a thing?

Oops. I updated it. Looks like he's on Mastodon now: https://mastodon.social/@Popehat

Even that looks abandoned. The last post on the Popehat website is from June of this year.

Threads:

https://www.threads.com/@kenpopehat

IMHO that "career building" part of it was always a bit problematic because of the incentives it could add.

Instead of "here's some small bits of code you might find useful" or "let me share my approach", the personal glory building style of OSS construction can and has tended towards "behold my framework" and a brand, and often even a VC etc funded entity to go with it.

I don't love LLMs just conjuring half-assed things into existence, but I've also been burned too many times by someone else's frameworkization of something that should just be a small modular bit, or part of a standard library. Languages like Rust that have exempted a lot from their standard library that frankly should be there suffer from this the most.

When they have Claude Upanishads and GPT Dodecahedron we'll know the singularity is near

How about (3): that in-house utility that you want to re-use across projects because it scratches one itch in precisely the way you want it scratched. Its raison d'être does not disappear from the appearance of LLM, it arguably gets stronger. You want the decisions that went into the library to be encoded in immutable form from the perspective of the contexts working on library dependents.

In the old days, both the investment in the library and the additional cost you'd want to sink on it to consider it publishing quality incentivised to keep it truly internal. LLM code however? It might be slop, but it's accurately groomed slop. Prompting the model to roleplay a public library author might even improve the output when it's in fact not published at all. The investment is low, the extra cost of sharing is low, worst that could happen is others actually picking it up and that would not be bad at all.

Is that spamming the public information universe on the faint hope that perhaps future models might come pre-trained with understanding of your library? Sure. But it's a very different thing from the scenarios described in (1).