I'll at least thank Simon Willison for finally saying the quiet part loud: he doesn't value what I would consider to be the core political aim of the free and open source movements.
Please don't harass him or dog pile him, but please also don't pretend that Willison is interested in open source. He's not and now he's saying so explicitly.
One might say I'm being uncharitable with my reading of his post. Fair. But I don't think he's earned an assumption of good faith at this point, so I'll defend my reading on that basis.
More to the point, he is being very explicit here that his vision of the open source movement does not include anyone *except* AI boosters. He is saying that the enclosure of open source by AI vendors is not only not a threat to free and open source movements, but that that enclosure is a good thing.
I am concerned that someone who is as antagonistic towards open source as a political movement has as much influence and power within open source as an institution.
The institution was always to some degree or another corporate capture of a political movement, I get it. See the endless turf wars between the FSF and the OSI for example. But this is an escalation and should be criticized on that basis.
@ellenor2000 @xgranade me. And I have been contributing to gcc for 24+ years. :).
Maybe I was only exposed to rms being horrible but still.
@pinskia @ellenor2000 @xgranade
I’ve heard of him because a bunch of his ‘I’m not an uncritical AI booster, I have written a lot on AI safety. Here is why AI is amazing’ posts were on lobste.rs (and probably still are, but I blocked the vibecoding tag).
I never saw him as influential in the F/OSS movements and never heard of him before he started writing about AI (or in any other context). Did he do something else?
@david_chisnall @ellenor2000 @xgranade Looks like he help developed Django.
