Thread by @adamhjk

Those of us who remember when open source was the novel underdog, allowing us to learn, grow, and build things our proprietary peers could not - we tend to see the relationship to corp $ in OSS as a net benefit, pretty much always.

That's because we remember when it wasn't so, and it took a lot of work to make it legit. But if you started your career with that as the ground truth, you're much more likely to see the problematic aspects of it; that your open code can be used by folks in ways you dislike.

Or that it simply puts more money in the pockets of the already wealthy, which it 100% absolutely does. You don't have to fight for the legitimacy of the open source network effect. You don't have to explain its value to anyone. Those arguments were already won!

Instead, you're living in the aftermath - trying to navigate the (sometimes) unintended consequences of the push we made for open source. And like all good human movements, you're met with resistance on all sides: open source heads who say you don't get it, biz saying your naive

That's how you get the level of irritation happening around Copilot. Copyright, Fair Use, AI/ML, exploitation of unpaid labor, respecting the author/artist - it's got all the ingredients of the very real issues plaguing FOSS in the 2020s.

If you look at this kerfuffle and think it's obvious, you're not paying enough attention to the complexity of the arguments on all sides. FOSS is not serving a significant swath of people in this era.

Not just the ones who are advocating for new licenses or moral frameworks. It's also not really serving the "I just want to take what is public and use it how I want" crowd. I mean, it is - but only because we mostly aren't paying attention to them at all. They're the majority.

Don't underestimate how quickly some of those ideas will move from fringe/marginal perspectives to the dominant ones. As storytelling goes, the anti-Copilot crowd have a *fabulously better* narrative than the pro-Copilot crowd.

If you're deciding which team you're on based on hot takes and story telling, it's pretty fucking hard to wind up on team Copilot if you take a shallow look. It's easy to wind up on team Copilot if you just use it, but never dig into the implications.

If you have a deep FOSS background, hang about with lawyers, get nerdy about copyright and fair use - you're probably easily on team Copilot is fine. But you see the issue, if you really think its important that Copilot is fine? There is not a lot of useful storytelling.

Just a lot of what sounds a whole lot like gatekeeping (you are not a lawyer, you don't understand fair use, here is the case law, you don't understand open source) and corporate shilling.

If you care about the ideals of FOSS that got us to where we are today - you are going to have to start articulating those values and morals in a new way. Because the old ways aren't resonating anymore with folks born in to a world where it has already won.

They don't have any fear at all of going back to the old status quo, any more than I had a fear of going back to soda fountains and milk delivery as a kid. And they're right - there is no risk of going back to the pre-FOSS status quo.

Whose going to explain those ideals to a new generation of people in a way that carry them forward? I suspect nobody. Which means it will either disappear in the next 20 years as a "thing", or it will be supplanted by whatever the ideals of the crowd thats forming now figure out.

Arguing against it is the equivalent of saying that kids these days don't understand "real music". It's a nostalgia and superiority trip for the folks who created the status quo. That doesn't mean the new ideas are all good ideas.

But you can't pretend that the issues they are trying to address aren't real issues, or that they weren't caused by the real-world implication of the victory of FOSS.