https://www.linkedin.com/posts/ar1ja_ai-foss-ethics-activity-7497819419973398528-vwhY
ok posted something substantial on linkedin what shall i do now
One of my not-so-hot takes is that the tech industry needs to stop exploiting the FOSS community's collective effort and humility as a stage for corporate stunts.
The trajectory of recent years has highlighted the ever-evolving trend of open-washing as we are watching corporations co-opt the language of software liberation whilst delivering none of the substance or commitment.
Two examples that come in context of the modern open-washing lanscape particularly portray this well:
First of all, with the rise of AI (particularly LLMs) we have seen a rise of "open weight" models without any training code, data crawlers, or anything else substantial other than a black box (the weights) to sell us the narrative of "democratised AI". There is no user liberation or genuine autonomy here - it is merely a corporate marketing stunt dressed up as benevolent community engagement.
Twitter's algorithm code dump back in 2023 also comes to mind. The reveal of Twitter's algorithm was a masterclass in PR over substance.
Simply dumping nearly 700k lines of lines onto a public repository does not make a project open source. Their dump arrived with zero commit history, was utterly devoid of documentation, completely missing any mechanism for meaningful community contribution, and was only a flood space for trolls, all while they were gaining valuable PR from the open-washing-led hype. Such behaviour fundamentally fails to align with even the most basic principles of FOSS ethics.
True FOSS is rooted in transparency and honesty. It requires the vulnerability to share one's working process, the integrity to welcome outside critique, and a commitment to user liberties.
What we are witnessing instead is the strip-mining of our community's hard-won ethical reputation simply to launder corporate track records. It's Wendy's twitter account clones all over again, albeit by dumping thousands of lines of slop and calling it "open source".
I honestly preferred when they just outright took our code over open-washing their slop...
#AI #FOSS #ethics #openwashing #techethics #opensource #llm #openweight #techindustry #transparency #OSS #liberty #tech #technology
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