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.
| code | https://lab.burn.capital/chaz |
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.
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":
The Open Source Initiative has published (news article here) its definition of “open source AI,” and it’s terrible. It allows for secret training data and mechanisms. It allows for development to be done in secret. Since for a neural network, the training data is the source code—it’s how the model gets programmed—the definition makes no sense. And it’s confusing; most “open source” AI models—like LLAMA—are open source in name only. But the OSI seems to have been co-opted by industry players that want both corporate secrecy and the “open source” label. (Here’s one ...
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.
Jason B
Sarah Jamie Lewis
d@nny disc@ mc²
mcc
Patrick 🌎
Jenniferplusplus