@Gargron have corps started putting lead in paint and gasoline again?

@Gargron

While the scenario hypothesized by the GNU maintainer is unfortunate, and quite tone deaf at that, it is also important to note that the use of LLMs is nothing like participating in actual slavery. Also, systems of ethics are relativistic in nature, so unless one wants to fall into a "my ethics are better than yours" trap, one must keep this in mind. "Free software" means different things to different people.

@Gargron I want every contribution I ever made to the FSF when I was young and naive back, adjusted for inflation, with interest.

@Gargron https://codeberg.org/ethical-foss/ai-free-foss-alternatives#bsd-based

@Gargron let's do some ethicsmaxxing

@Gargron It turned out to be about corporations getting a lot of people to work for free ... it's not a big leap from that to actually owning the means of production outright and making them work for free.

@Gargron are we going to ignore that computers are built with products of child labor in conditions more akin to slavery than anything else?

@Gargron
Absolutely 100%, thank you for pointing out what shouldn't need to be pointed but JFHC

@Gargron great question. i got involved in FOSS through activism on *other* topics, and i suspect i am not alone in that

@Gargron I don't know, but FSF says freedom means freedom to do anything. Literally anything. Regardless of anything.

@Gargron Freedom without ethics and humanitarian values is chaos. The one that erupts in war torn countries etc Everybody is “free” to kill each other. In the same analogy free software without ethics leads to the same dog eat dog world we tried to evade in the first place.

@Gargron

so no contributions from the genocidal apartheid war-criminal fascist state of israel ?

@Gargron This whole thread needs a dose of "I don't argue with people John Brown would have shot" stapled to it, JFC.

@Gargron What's software for? I'm pretty sure Babbage was just bored. Or he was trying to get rich.

I don't think he was thinking about ethics.

@Gargron GNU GPL doesn't ban contributions from slaves forced to work on software, so it is… fine?

@Gargron clearly unethical, but isn't his point that GNU's ethical mission has a limited scope (namely, software freedom, copyright, user privacy, etc)?

If you filtered source code contributions along every single moral dimension, you would end up with pretty much nothing at the intersection.

Think of all the scientific discoveries and tech invented by horrible people or horrible regimes. What matters to scientists is that the science is good. Historians and tribunals can judge the rest.