YHK - yet another hacker news clone

For the opposite take, here's a former emacs contributor recoiling in horror at discovering that FSF isn't there to fight climate change, whaling, civil war or whatever moral struggle you hold dear this week.

https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2026-11/msg00...

This extends beyond software to technology in general. The "tool use" theory, by which technologies are neutral instruments with no moral or political implications until put to use, is an incredibly naive, weak theory that was basically killed and buried by Langdon Winner back in the 70s. If you don't have time to read his books, at least read ["Do Artifacts have Politics?"](https://faculty.cc.gatech.edu/~beki/cs4001/Winner.pdf) which states the case very clearly.

Of course, most technologists have never read a letter of a single work in the philosophy of technology, so they don't know this, let alone who Winner is, let alone that people actually think about and theorize the impacts of technology on a broad scale seriously (even though Winner worked at MIT, the ever vaunted institution of the technical priesthood). Of course, the people building things are the very people who should be thinking about the potential effects of the things they are building deeply and seriously, but apparently that's too much to ask.

This sounds like a /lot/ of opinions on a /lot/ of open source work - that the author has contributed nothing to. Snipe at RMS, trivialize GNU, and add all types of emotional nonsense that didn't exist at the time all this free software was being written. The author would should that - except they were likely not born yet, and are speaking on concepts they are utterly ignorant of.

At the brink of the epistemological and societal shift of modern AI.

How do the four freedoms and their raison d’être apply in the AI age ?

Doesn't it hold that If you don’t own the weights the AI ( or its sponsoring entity ) owns you.

Are weights like software or akin to content ?

For the AI to be free software a user should be able to :

Run the AI model on their own hardware

See the AI’s weights, architecture

Modify the AI by fine tuning, quantization, and any other method.

Share the modifications with the community

As some legal precedents are that an AI cannot create work that is copyrightable.

Thus if an AI creates an AI is it therefore public domain ?

As it would seem many AI are trained on copyrighted work by humans some of which is CC0, free software and public doman does it therefore follow the AI weights are uncopyrightable ?

As there are open-weight models that are not open-source nor free should the OSI and FSF provide and promote the advantages of new types of license for AI’s as well as explicit public domain licenses for AI output to remive all doubt.

Can copyleft licenses apply if copyright doesn’t ?

Is the source code of an AI its training program and its training and validation sets ?

This is the logic of "if you're not with us you're against us." It denies the possibility of neutrality even by inaction. The concept of neutrality becomes the myth, and there's no point in debating whether it applies to any domain, because that becomes false as a tautology.