Thought experiment: imagine a language model where you can describe exactly how you want software to behave, and it produces a binary that does that. You don't get the source code, but it works 100% of the time. As long as you can install this binary on whatever device you have, does this achieve the goals of free software?
@mjg59 it should be/isnt obvious that the more you obfuscate the process of compilation the farther you get from a compiler that gives you freedom 1- regardless of the input giving you 4freedoms & the output being a result of that input.
btw i wrote a toy transpiler that turned stallmans verbatim-copying-only essays into transformative, executable scripts and he didnt get the humour or the point. he thought i was trying to prove something- i was just trying to get him to look at it differently.
@trdebunked I completely agree there, you're pushing a free idea into an opaque blob in order to receive free code. But free software as defined in the 80s was fine with opaque compilers, and I don't think anything ever happened to expressly redefine that
@trdebunked (I don't think LLM models are inherently non-free - if someone supplied all the tools and the training data someone could rebuild that, the problem is that it would be implausibly expensive for most people to do so, but again that's not something that's been factored into the free software definition)
@mjg59 yeah not inherently, just most often in practice. its more of a tendency.
one of my bigger obsessions with free software is looking at ways that freedom can be effectively diminished without being explicitly violated.
note i prefer openbsd to gnu/linux because i think it does more to protect freedom 3, but i love any work done to remove non-free stuff from it too. if the goal is perfection there will be detours and setbacks, while the fsf paints things into corners.
@trdebunked I think it's interesting tying this into the "systemd isn't really free software because it's so complicated" kind of argument. Free software is never going to be equivalently free for everyone - people who can code enjoy more freedom than people who can't (unless they have enough money to pay someone to do it). Where do boundaries get drawn?
@mjg59 i simplify this by saying that the more bloated a project becomes, the closer it approaches a binary blob. my original interest was electronics, which makes me very sympathetic to free hw. i appreciate takes like yours that point out the times where machine code / decompiled binaries actually works like source code. not all hacking is source hacking- a lot of it isnt actually.
the other side of that of course, is that source code makes many changes more accessible.
@trdebunked I'd kind of like some sort of heuristic about this - I don't think systemd is any more complicated than the Linux kernel, which has its own build system, config system, linked list implementation, magical macros that do all kinds of things, and so on. But it's clear that many people do feel that there's a level of complexity that compromises freedom, and I have no idea how to identify where that is.
@mjg59 bloat is subjective but it reduces accessibility.
for me, squaring the circle and a perfect world isnt bloat-free because theres no reasonable way to define that. in a perfect world, bloat is optional because non-bloat is always available and an option.
for me the crime of systemd is how damned hard it is to completely eliminate from your system, not from the world. it approaches the idea of mandatory software. for years people have debated the finer points of this while it takes over.
@trdebunked I think the obvious response there is just how much free software ended up depending on GNU behaviour (be that libc, gcc, or even somewhat more arguably Linux)
@mjg59 i think gnu and libc and gcc are all failures.
they were the flagship of the movement, and i dont at this time see a viable replacement- nor do i have any wish to rewrite history.
i want a grassroots, even anticapitalist freesw movement. the fsd does not require this and existing licenses are not the problem. nc is non-free.
but the problem as i see it is that 99% of non-profits succumb to influence and takeover by for-profits.
gnu is like the titanic- no lifeboats. ibm is an iceberg.
@mjg59 forkability, as i see it, is key.
its not that gcc cant be complex- we actually want optimising compilers, not just tinycc.
but we want optimising compilers that dont require the overhead of a large corporation who will ultimately dictate HOW we develop the software.
the fsf never saw that coming, which is understandable. they wont even fight it, which is inexcusable.
it took some time, but i share your pain about stallmans personal failings. but the fsf is also the issue.
@mjg59 i suck at math, which is why i fell in love with computers that do it for me, rather than pursue electronics which would have been hopeless.
i dont expect all computing to be brought down to my level. no one says eradicate stairs, they say install ramps. the more that free software relies foremost on software that isnt bloated, the more forkable it is.
but we want haskell even if i suck at math. we want physics even if its over my head. not everything can be solved with simplicity.
@mjg59 one of the things that really pisses me off about the movement in general- and i bet you share my pain on this- is that to create gnu it was necessary to temporarily enlist non-free components to bootstrap something more fundamentally free... and while of course this is not denied and even granted an explicit exception- when you do it, it becomes subjected to all sorts of double standards and bad takes from the orthodoxy.
for example: free hw deserves the same graces to become viable.
@trdebunked That is a take I hadn't really considered, thank you!