- Joined
- Dec 18, 2021
I feel like Omarchy is the right-wing side of the pincer that's trying to smother the GPL. The left-wing side is obvious, Rust & MIT rewrites, and anti-Stallman propaganda is everywhere. The corporate center or corporate motivation is pretty obvious too, but it's more centered around protecting profits and only addressing Open Source in terms of development productivity while never addressing user freedoms.
There hasn't been any sort of right-wing response. There's right-wing pushback online around CoCs and pronouns and thought-policing, but it's never been in conflict with the GPL until DHH and Omarchy.
On Omarchy's website, they specifically say:
I just decided to jump around the Brody DHH podcast on Omarchy. Brody brings up the GPL, and DHH dismisses it as a relic of the past. He loves the MIT license and thinks that caring about the GPL is basically dumb and code is no longer valuable anymore because LLMs can generate it. I think the issue with that opinion is that with the MIT license, there's nothing to stop really good semi-closed software from being built on the open source software supports, but then slowly letting the open source side of the project wither away.
That withering would be visible right now, and if there was some project like Chromium that was being subverted in that way, it could be stopped or pushed back by Open Source developers. But once LLMs get seriously good, corpos can crank up the cost of tokens and corporate-backed developers will be able to churn out code like crazy, while human developers will be stuck either paying huge amounts of money to try and keep up, or they will be making human-speed progress on competing projects, while the corporate projects can ignore the Open Source downstream, or poison it with complexity, or add tons of cool features that the Open Source developers can't keep up with until the closed software is the only up-to-date/secure software available.
I know a lot of people don't care about licenses or software politics in this thread, but it just seems like there's this big push to get as many things on permissive licenses right now. I worry that if big business can make that happen, then they can slowly start letting free software wither away while they pump lots of money and resources into the more permissively licensed projects. Then, they could do a similar thing that phones do, where if it's not updated enough, then banking and other important apps wont work. If they can create a standard that's difficult or expensive enough to meet, and then they subsidize the standard for projects they like, the corpos win. In fact, in the Brodie DHH interview, DHH basically says as much. If code was massively expensive "until 5 minutes ago" and the GPL made sense when code was massively expensive, then code can be made basically as expensive as it used to be on a whim by the big AI companies, and the GPL will go back to being valuable, but you can't unsubvert the GPL as easily as corpos can manipulate the cost of tokens.
I hope this isn't too autistic (it is, I know it is, I can see the wall of text.) but it just feels like this is the endgame of the whole enshittification meme. Tech news is full of AI agents finding security holes everywhere. Everybody basically agrees that AI is a bubble, and the hardware that normal people would need to run frontier-level models is just multiplying in price and will be for maybe the next decade or more. And now Omarchy comes around, and they're not only the most common-sense tech project that's come around in years, they're also the most well funded, and most aggressively pro-AI workflow. Something is up. There's going to be something done to ensure critical software is safe from AI attacks, and that will be the perfect opportunity to start strangling FOSS with regulations, and once it's strangled there's nothing to stop everything to be filled to the brim with tracking and adds and paid algorithm boosts and good-boy Skinner-Box engagement & Pavlovian mind-shaping mechanics. And if contributors time isn't going to be enough to keep up with patches and features, then the door is open for FOSS to be strangled and buried.
Here's a link to the GPL bit in the Brodie DHH interview. (Also I haven't really seen GPL or software freedom come up outside of this interview, which seems a little weird):
There hasn't been any sort of right-wing response. There's right-wing pushback online around CoCs and pronouns and thought-policing, but it's never been in conflict with the GPL until DHH and Omarchy.
On Omarchy's website, they specifically say:
Obviously I'm on board with that. I think that hating Hyprland for the "who/cares" joke is dumb and I think the joke was funny. I think that the anti-LLM hate is usually hysterical. Basically, I'm the target audience of the Omarchy distro. And the culture war side of Omarchy did get me to download and check out Omarchy. But it just feels off. All the stuff Omarchy, DHH, and Hyprland are getting heat from are things that feel like mainstream vaguely right-wing but basic normal opinions. It feels too good to be true. It feels manufactured. It's like how all of a sudden there were people-of-gender and guys in pink dresses everywhere in Occupy Wallstreet coverage, and then massive spikes in dumb culture-war terms in the news. But in this case I like and agree with the subversive, seriously well funded, somehow in every youtube-video interlopers.
I just decided to jump around the Brody DHH podcast on Omarchy. Brody brings up the GPL, and DHH dismisses it as a relic of the past. He loves the MIT license and thinks that caring about the GPL is basically dumb and code is no longer valuable anymore because LLMs can generate it. I think the issue with that opinion is that with the MIT license, there's nothing to stop really good semi-closed software from being built on the open source software supports, but then slowly letting the open source side of the project wither away.
That withering would be visible right now, and if there was some project like Chromium that was being subverted in that way, it could be stopped or pushed back by Open Source developers. But once LLMs get seriously good, corpos can crank up the cost of tokens and corporate-backed developers will be able to churn out code like crazy, while human developers will be stuck either paying huge amounts of money to try and keep up, or they will be making human-speed progress on competing projects, while the corporate projects can ignore the Open Source downstream, or poison it with complexity, or add tons of cool features that the Open Source developers can't keep up with until the closed software is the only up-to-date/secure software available.
I know a lot of people don't care about licenses or software politics in this thread, but it just seems like there's this big push to get as many things on permissive licenses right now. I worry that if big business can make that happen, then they can slowly start letting free software wither away while they pump lots of money and resources into the more permissively licensed projects. Then, they could do a similar thing that phones do, where if it's not updated enough, then banking and other important apps wont work. If they can create a standard that's difficult or expensive enough to meet, and then they subsidize the standard for projects they like, the corpos win. In fact, in the Brodie DHH interview, DHH basically says as much. If code was massively expensive "until 5 minutes ago" and the GPL made sense when code was massively expensive, then code can be made basically as expensive as it used to be on a whim by the big AI companies, and the GPL will go back to being valuable, but you can't unsubvert the GPL as easily as corpos can manipulate the cost of tokens.
I hope this isn't too autistic (it is, I know it is, I can see the wall of text.) but it just feels like this is the endgame of the whole enshittification meme. Tech news is full of AI agents finding security holes everywhere. Everybody basically agrees that AI is a bubble, and the hardware that normal people would need to run frontier-level models is just multiplying in price and will be for maybe the next decade or more. And now Omarchy comes around, and they're not only the most common-sense tech project that's come around in years, they're also the most well funded, and most aggressively pro-AI workflow. Something is up. There's going to be something done to ensure critical software is safe from AI attacks, and that will be the perfect opportunity to start strangling FOSS with regulations, and once it's strangled there's nothing to stop everything to be filled to the brim with tracking and adds and paid algorithm boosts and good-boy Skinner-Box engagement & Pavlovian mind-shaping mechanics. And if contributors time isn't going to be enough to keep up with patches and features, then the door is open for FOSS to be strangled and buried.
Here's a link to the GPL bit in the Brodie DHH interview. (Also I haven't really seen GPL or software freedom come up outside of this interview, which seems a little weird):
