Post #2330813
2026-04-19 14:52 UTC
@hp@mastodon.tmm.cx @promovicz@chaos.social @dieweltist@bunt.social Free software is about source code access, not price. As a thought experiment, if Anthropic (for example) made their entire software stack open source because they were confident that 99.9% of their users wouldn't have the data centers to actually run it, would that be morally OK from a purely free software POV?
(To put my cards on the table: my answer is "yes".)
Replies (1)
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@hp@mastodon.tmm.cx 2026-04-19 15:03
@peterb@mathstodon.xyz @promovicz@chaos.social @dieweltist@bunt.social in that hypothetical, probably yes. But it's not just that software in this case, I'd say that it is the model itself as well. The model is functionally indistinguishable from bytecode for some kind of VM. But as far as the actual thing I was talking about; that is NOT what basically anyone who uses these models talks about. *Today*, suggesting that LLMs are some kind of "implementation" of the free software goals, while it is still all SaaS is just wrong.