Bonum Certa Men Certa

LWN (Earlier This Week) is GAFAM Openwashing Amplified

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Jul 24, 2024

Such propaganda and openwashing make one wonder...

Mark Zuckerberg has posted an article announcing some new releases of the Llama large language model and going on at length about why open-source models are important

As one comment says further down:

Articles like this make me wonder what FOSS even is. Not as an abbreviation, but as a movement.

The core of FOSS, to me, has always been a rebellion against people telling us our way of working shouldn't work: Humans are competitive, there would be no innovation without strict intellectual property, progress can only be driven by rare geniuses with vast power and wealth, the market is the only way to distribute resources and responsibilities, etc. And yet despite that, it doesn't just work, it works better. So much better that even corporations can't ignore it.

This has all of the language of FOSS, it uses the arguments we use. But instead we have a project that's run by one of the fiercly anticompetitive monopolists, under their top down control, which only they can train and only they can even really run at scale, released merely to use the community as a cudgel against their competitors. With the ultimate purpose but to launder copyright through a big machine that overwhelms the joy of human creation with an endless slop of predictive goop.

And sure, we can say to ourselves "well this isn't _true_ FOSS". But does that change anything? Perhaps, if this is what's being said with it, the rhetoric of vague appeals to "freedom" and "openness" has outlived it's usefulness.

"The oppressor will always attempt to co-opt the language of the oppressed. He's just following the standard playbook," the reply said.

The editor of LWN helps Facebook do this.

Another comment says: "The question of "is a set of weights enough to make something open" is a source of open debate. But independent of that, the *license* of Llama is unquestionably proprietary."

So readers of LWN are a step ahead of the editor.

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