The "end of history" hangover is real. We went about building the modern stack assuming bad actors were outliers, not state-sponsored standard procedure. But trying to legislate good use into licenses? I don't know how you would realistically implement it and to what extent? That solution implies we have to move toward zero-trust architectures even within open communities.
As an example: formal proofs and compartmentalization are unsexy but they're a solid way we survive the next decade of adversarial noise.
I remember reading a quote somewhere that stuck with me. Paraphrasing, "If the architecture of my code doesn't enforce privacy and resistance to censorship by default, we have to assume it will be weaponized".
I am out of ideas, practical ones, lots sound good on paper and in theory. It's a bit sad tbh. Always curious to hear more on this issue from smarter people.
It's also questionable to which extent restrictive licenses for open source software stay that relevant in the first place, as you can now relatively easily run an AI code generator that just imitates the logic of the FOSS project, but with newly generated code, so that you don't need to adhere to a license's restrictions at all.
Zero trust cannot exist as long as you interact with the real world. The problem wasn't trust per se, but blind trust.
The answer isn't to eschew trust (because you can't) but to organize it with social structures, like what people did with “chain of trust” certificates back then before it became commoditized by commercial providers and cloud giants.
It’s changing but not completely.
It would require it not to be easy to farm (Entropy detection on user behaviour perhaps and clique detection).
> NGI Zero, a family of research programmes including NGI0 Entrust, NGI0 Core and NGI0 Commons Fund, part of the Next Generation Internet initiative.
with the Next Generation Internet thing at the end receiving money/financing from the political supra-state entity called the EU [1] . So I guess said speech-holder is not happy because political entities which are seen by the EU as adversarial are also using open-source code? Not sure how war plays into this, as I’m sure he must be aware of the hundreds of billions of euros the EU has allocated for that.
[1] https://ngi.eu/
throwfaraway135•1h ago
But the part about FOSS being used in a project not aligned with the creator's values seams hypocritical:
IMO FOOS is a gift to humanity and as such:
"A gift should be given freely, without obligation or expectation, as a true expression of love and kindness"
poszlem•1h ago
If this is suddenly being weaponised against us, I don't see how that's not a problem.
breezykoi•59m ago
juliangmp•34m ago
If it took some people in the FOSS space this long that it also includes people, companies or purposes they disagree with, then I don't know what to tell them.
Applejinx•36m ago
If what I'm doing is interesting or unusual, LLMs will firstly not recognize that it's different, secondly will screw up when blindly combining it with stuff that isn't different, and thirdly if it's smart enough to not screw that up, it will ignore my work in favor of stealing from CLOSED source repos it gains access to, on the rationale that those are more valuable because they are guarded.
And I'm pretty sure that they're scraping private repos already because that seems the maximally evil and greedy thing to do, so as a FOSS guy I figure I'm already covered, protected by a counterproductive but knowingly evil behavior.
These are not smart systems, but even more they are not wise systems, so even if they gain smarts that doesn't mean they become a problem for me. More likely they become a problem for people who lean on intellectual property and privacy, and I took a pretty substantial pay cut to not have to lean on those things.
croisillon•1h ago
wazoox•1h ago
Saint-Just
throwfaraway135•24m ago
For example, a lot of Palestinians are not tolerant towards LGPT people -> a lot of LGPT people are not tolerant towards Israelis -> a lot of Israelis are not tolerant towards Palestinians.
Also how do you know if you are intolerant or intolerant towards intolerance?
Palmik•1h ago
Training on my code / media / other data? No worries, just make sure the weights and other derived artifacts are released under similarly permissive license.
breezykoi•1h ago
s1mplicissimus•1h ago
gentooflux•1h ago
fweirdo•59m ago
I agree with you.
Imagine a parallel Earth where there was a free OS that the majority in the world used called GNU/Felix.
Felix (it/its), who wrote GNU/Felix and who was the project’s strong but kind leader, one day had a head injury that somehow decreased its empathy but raised its IQ.
Subordinates of Felix on the council of leadership noticed that it was adding features that would track all user data to use in some nefarious plan.
In this case, most would agree that for both the freedom and good of all, Felix should no longer lead this effort.
However, they would want to be sure that even the Will Bates’ great company Bikerosoft didn’t lead the project either, because despite its wonderful and ubiquitous Bikerosoft Office apps and Ezure cloud tools and infrastructure, it was a profit-based company.