I recently did a Free Software Day event and old timers from FSF showed up.
It was great, but the ecosystem is quickly deteriorating and younger people are born in walled gardens.
The EU is destroying open source in Europe thanks to CRA in the name of security.
AI models mostly have crappy licenses that restrict usage. The worst culprit is HuggingFace with Stable Diffusion and OpenRail which is anything but open.
It's a "don't be evil license", where evil is defined by HuggingFace but it opens the door to BS like "you're emitting too much CO2, you can't use this".
I'm sure most people at Huggingface are not doing it maliciously, they probably are all 20-something socialists making half a mill a year and they don't care about freedom.
At the same time they're also releasing a bunch of real OSS software under Apache 2.0 (often to go with OpenRail licensed models).
So yeah, we're screwed.
At the same time, I think governments are removing even more freedom that what's happening in software, so I'm kind of busy country hopping and more concerned about not becoming even more of a slave I am right now.
> The EU is destroying open source in Europe thanks to CRA in the name of security.
Can you develop a bit on that ?
The EU is one of the rare large public institution on Mastodon currently.
Also one of the rare institution to sue properly the GAFAMs successfully when they on-purpose try to fuck user around with carefully designed locked-in solution (Hello Internet Explorer, Safari and App store).
Like every large political institution, it is an hydra with many yeads. Nothing in the EU is entirely clean. But I would rank then more in favor of OSS than against.
The EU (technically, the European Commission and the European Council) is a large organization, so naturally there are many positions inside.
However, my impression is it has been a force for good overall, giving us cross-country mobility, getting rid of cellphone roaming charges, and avoiding waste by trying to standardize plugs. They notably introduced GDPR to protect citizen's data and they provide a court of human rights, and there is a push for "data sovereignty".
It was great, but the ecosystem is quickly deteriorating and younger people are born in walled gardens.
The EU is destroying open source in Europe thanks to CRA in the name of security.
AI models mostly have crappy licenses that restrict usage. The worst culprit is HuggingFace with Stable Diffusion and OpenRail which is anything but open. It's a "don't be evil license", where evil is defined by HuggingFace but it opens the door to BS like "you're emitting too much CO2, you can't use this".
I'm sure most people at Huggingface are not doing it maliciously, they probably are all 20-something socialists making half a mill a year and they don't care about freedom.
At the same time they're also releasing a bunch of real OSS software under Apache 2.0 (often to go with OpenRail licensed models).
So yeah, we're screwed.
At the same time, I think governments are removing even more freedom that what's happening in software, so I'm kind of busy country hopping and more concerned about not becoming even more of a slave I am right now.