[dithered_djinn]

I see what you are saying and don't completely disagree. I however feel that the spirit of free software is to set all software free. From that it follows, that if we are going to follow the current route of complete disregard for authorship and licenses, then the free software movement should continue fighting to liberate all software in existence. In other words, those LLM's that you mention that are to enable software freedom for users who cannot code themselves, in a fair world, they would be trained with both free and proprietary software. After all, a derivative work from a proprietary software should also be subject to fair use. The output produced by the LLM wouldn't necessarily be a literal copy-paste of any particular proprietary software... as the models would just be "learning" from them. The company could just continue doing business as usual, build on their brand and yada yada yada.

Regarding the licensing, I'll restate my point that the Affero license was created precisely in a moment where the existing licenses could no longer uphold the freedoms that the Free Software Foundation set out to defend. A change of license was the right solution at that particular point in time and, if it worked then, I think we can all agree that there is at least a precedent that such a course of action might work and should at the very least be considered as a possible solution for today's problems.

That said, my own personal view is more aligned with demanding the nation states to pressure big corporations so that currently closed-source software becomes at least open-source (either by law, or simply by stopping using it and invest their budget in free alternatives instead). Note I said open source and not free. I just would like to read their code and feed it to my LLM's :)

[pabs3]

On setting all software free, indeed, thats the point made in the post by mjg59. None of the AI companies train on their own proprietary software though, which is telling.

On Affero, that was indeed definitely needed, although some folks on HN seem to think that privately modifying code is allowed by copyright, even if the modified version is outputting a public website, thus what the license says is irrelevant. That seems bogus to me, but seems a loophole if it is legit. Anyway, personally I think that people should simply just never use SaaS, nor web apps. It also doesn't help with data portability.

I'd go further and advocate for legally mandated source code escrow for copyright validity, and GPL like rights to the code once public, which would happen if the software is off the market for N years.

[dithered_djinn]

> I'd go further and advocate for legally mandated source code escrow for copyright validity, and GPL like rights to the code once public, which would happen if the software is off the market for N years.

I agree 100%.