Discussion
AI is causing a schism, but the cracks were there from the very beginning of the community.
LLMs and their invasion of our commons is merely the loudest symptom of what's rotten in the state of FOSS.
It's being forced on communities and none of our banner organisations seem to be actively fighting that spread.
Who is the code for?
Devs? It's being forced.
Non dev folks ? They want software that isn't broken that works on their hardware.
Who is FOSS for? Human Rights?
Apparently not. 🤷♀️
@ramsey I honestly think the schism was already in motion.
It's just that before the folks that left were perhaps considered inconvenient or troublemakers. It happened every once and awhile with individuals. We've thrown away folks.
I also think there's something to @MaddieM4 ideas of loose coalitions of folks. It gives folks some choice in who they can organise with.
Having a large banner organisation to follow had the disadvantage of centralised power because of founder influence.
@ramsey Plus to toot my own horn, our communities issues are a huge part of why my @cobbles blog exists.
Technology isn't neutral. Yet there's a sizable proportion of folks (mostly extremely privileged men ) who want to deny this.
Yet it's the rest of us who feel responsibility for the harms caused to us.
Frankly we shouldn't have to. We didn't want this burden, folks have been warning about the issues with the community for years.
We're looking at a sunk cost fallacy with FOSS.
@onepict I’m worried about the schism. Our communities are starting to eat themselves alive.