The Myth of Neutral Code
foss.life
foss.life
A civilian who does not actively protest their government is not neutral, but they are not as complicit as the active participants.
Refusing to take a stance benefits the status quo. The status quo is not “neutral”.
If neutrality exists in some arrangement other than the status quo, isn't that vision of what could be necessarily a political one, and therefore not neutral?
No. It does not. It is, and has always been, an illusion of the privileged.
It's also not "if you're not with us you're against us." It stems from a genuine analysis of how systems work, especially systems of oppression.
No one is exempt from politics. No one can avoid being part of the system, one way or another. It's just that some people are privileged enough that the status quo supports us in ways they never ever notice, the way we never stop and think about the air we breathe. Others aren't so lucky: their continued existence is labeled by many as "political", especially if they want to be seen in public or involved in government.
The author well points out the history of Free, open source and MIT licensed Softwares derives much from its founders.
Yet people contributed under its various licenses, seeing that the license protected their differing levels of freedoms.
By contributing they entered into a contract with the licenses.
FOSS software mirrors society in being polarised and divided along various lines.
Many licenses now have codes of conduct for the community attached AFAIK to protect contributors against this polarisation.
The movement like most requires dynamic adaptation to face new challenges and those that choose to disagree with a groups license and surrounding documents are free to fork it.
Users are free to complain, gripe and campaign for their own point of view. Just because the fork you agree with cannot attract developers, mindshare or users should not be used to indite other forks.
Yet here we are today in the AI era and the most prevalent license today is the corporate doctrine of maximising shareholder value to which all other causes are secondary.
The ability to have alternative software, OSes and AIs is important for the freedom to have alternative views of any sort.
Society is extremely polarised politically and FOSS reflects these perhaps insurmountable divisions.
Divide and conquer would seem to be in effect. Democracy is the ability to seek reasonable compromise with those whom we disagree. This is not always possible sometimes morally, legally or circumstantially yet it is wise to be aware of the history of FOSS and how it was attacked, embraced, extended and never extinguished.
AI has well documented biases due to training set representation, camera sensors spectral range, the bias of sponsoring entities - both purposeful and unintentional and mostly unknown and somewhat unconstrainable.
How do the four freedoms and their raison d’être apply to this all powerful new software paradigm that has much oversight and perhaps will run all our lives in this new AI age ?
Doesn't it hold that If you don’t own the weights the AI ( or its sponsoring entity ) owns you.
Are weights like software or akin to content ?
Is it the case that for the AI to be free software a user should be able to :
1) Run the AI model on their own hardware
2) See the AI’s weights, architecture
3) Modify the AI by fine tuning, quantization, and any other method.
4) Share the modifications with the community
Some legal precedents rule that an AI cannot create work that is copyrightable.
Thus if an AI creates an AI is it therefore public domain ?
As it would seem many AI are trained on copyrighted work by humans some of which is CC0, free software and public doman does it therefore follow the AI weights are uncopyrightable ?
As there are open-weight models that are not open-source nor free should the OSI and FSF provide and promote the advantages of new types of license for AI’s as well as explicit public domain licenses for AI output to remove all doubt.
Can copyleft licenses apply if copyright doesn’t ?
Is the source code of an AI not merely the weights but its architecture, training regime and the training and validation sets ?
The future is exciting, dangerous, awful and fun. Freedom is worth fighting to ensure.
Chaos is most definitely not freedom, it's a cover for slavery. "Fighting" for the sake fighting for a future that's "exciting, dangerous, awful and fun" will never achieve anything approaching freedom, it's chaos for the sake chaos.
https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2026-11/msg00...
If we're talking about the left-wing politics of "Freedom" however, yes of course; that was the entire point. We were rebelling against the system for the good of humanity, or something. Changing "master" to "main" is not even close to being the same thing.
is there some kind of outcry on codeberg? I assumed the whole point of codeberg was a more heavily code-of-conducted environment compared to github and banning LLM repos would be kind of step one for that today. you dont need to go into an FSF moralizing loop to make that argument.
Of course, most technologists have never read a letter of a single work in the philosophy of technology, so they don't know this, let alone who Winner is, let alone that people actually think about and theorize the impacts of technology on a broad scale seriously (even though Winner worked at MIT, the ever vaunted institution of the technical priesthood). Of course, the people building things are the very people who should be thinking about the potential effects of the things they are building deeply and seriously, but apparently that's too much to ask.