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"I support it only if it's open source" should be a more common viewpoint

vitalik.eth.limo /general/2025/08/12/onlyopensource.html

What are your thoughts? Any counter-counter points to the author's response to most concerns regarding open source?

49 comments

  • Heh. It's a very software-centric view. Open source trivializes things that can run as software on readily available hardware, but if there's a linear relationship between cost of hardware/manufacture and results you aren't solving much of the gatekeeping. There's plenty of open source availability for a lot of stuff, from email to LLMs, that nobody self-hosts. The problem isn't the underlying reproduction rights.

    I will say this, I don't care about what the author or anybody else "supports". If we should have learned something from the last decade or two is that "support" means jack shit.

    I care about regulation. And just like I think education, transportation, medical patents, health care and other key resources should be fundamentally public by law, the same is true of other technologies.

  • I love the thought, but it the thinking behind it is very utopian. It doesn't match the real world. In my experience, if a company can't make all of the profit from a thing they invest in, they simply won't invest. I wish that wasn't the case, but it's what I've seen. The C-Suite and management would rather make 100% profit from living in the dark ages compared to "just" 99% of the profit from pushing the world forward.

  • I agree.

    Even more broadly, politically - copyleft in general is very unpopular with people, even amongst leftists and self-identified communists who you'd think would be all about that since y'know, good of the commons and the fact that communist states literally didn't give a fuck about copyright and the literature seeing it transparently as another government method of enforcing corporate power, especially apparent today when it comes to pharmaceuticals snd the fact that capitalism needs this intellectual property monopoly as an added incentive for R&D is an issue with capitalism's broken incentive structures, not cost in and of itself or science/technology.

    Few people seem to understand the power of intellectual property, and various critics of corporate technology either omit mentioning or openly defend intellectual property, despite corporations having monopolies being the reason enshittification is such a phenomenon in the first place.

    It seems like a lot of arguments about the role of technology in society instead boil down to more-stuffism vs. less-stuffism, usually based on emotionally charged preference for modern aesthetics or how much they believe the noble savage/appeal to nature fallacies.

    When it comes to AI for instance, anyone reasonable can see that if it's open sourced for everyone to use then it's just a simple common good like a public library, use it (responsibly) and there's no issue.

    Closed source private models in use by corporations suck up the environment (which belongs to everyone) and use the capital they steal from wage workers who actually produce the things they sell to give themselves leverage over said consumers/workers and other corporations, and this is not fair to the 99%.

    Picture a world where AI is good enough to where it actually provides value to use it in a good chunk of jobs, and the best AI is corporate and closed source, and they just enshittified it and jacked up the prices, but if you want to get a job, you better know how to use it well. It would mean that corpo has an enormous power over your life now and you got little choice but to pony up, and they can raise prices whenever they want and snowball that capital into more and more.

    I think the reason in this instance is that a lot of artists are bourgeoisie themselves and they understand that. They may be progressive as a personality trait/gimmick/style and talk about "empathy" but they understand the material reality of things.

    They had the opportunities and the room for failure necessary to go into such a high risk field, and their ultimate form of commercial success is essentially using that privilege to create intellectual property they could make money from, hence the "concerns" over "style theft" and moralist fearmongering over vaguely defined concepts like "soulless", which is usually as arbitrary as "white" for racists (not implying equivalence here).

    I find generally that a lot of the anti-AI viewpoints are simple self-serving veils of bourgeoisie who's capital is threatened, no different from the culture war fearmongering about vaping, a dying grasp of the tobacco companies of old threatened by shenzen gadget slop factories.

    The material reality is that digital goods are effectively infinite, copying an image isn't a crime nevermind copying a style or some such, it is transparently absurd to imply otherwise.

  • How the world "should" respond to the thing we care about is an actively counter-productive thing to get hung up on.

    Its much important how they do respond to it, and how we can reach those who don't connect with it

    (And that doesn't just lecturing people and trying to brow beat them into caring about it, which seems like the default approach for a lot of foss folks 🥲 thats the opposite or reaching people, that's alienating them)

  • Consider, though, the value you received in non-monetary terms. How much would you have had to pay?

49 comments