mastodon.world is one of the many independent Mastodon servers you can use to participate in the fediverse.
Generic Mastodon server for anyone to use.

Server stats:

8.9K
active users

#opensourceinitiative

2 posts2 participants1 post today

@osi Did you inform these 50 maintainers of how you refuse to publish the unredracted 2025 election results? That hundreds of #FOSS hackers have signed a petition for you to do so, including several foundational organizations -- @gnome @debian? codeberg.org/OSI-Concerns/elec #OSI #OpenSource #OpenSourceInitiative

Summary card of repository OSI-Concerns/election-results-2025
Codeberg.orgelection-results-2025Petition to Open Source Initiative to publish 2025 Board election results. Sign using pull request (see below).

@mikemcquaid Can you help putting pressure on the @osi to publish the unredracted 2025 election results that the #OSI have refused to publish despite calls from the #FLOSS #FOSS #OSS community? codeberg.org/OSI-Concerns/elec the #OpenSourceInitiative has published the results since the start, but this year they refuse to be transparent in their election process. @downey @richardfontana @bkuhn

Summary card of repository OSI-Concerns/election-results-2025
Codeberg.orgelection-results-2025Petition to Open Source Initiative to publish 2025 Board election results. Sign using pull request (see below).

I would argue the greater mistake was rebranding #freesoftware and forming a dull corporate entity known as the #opensourceinitiative. Open source as a term* has always been poorly defined despite being legally identical to Free/Libre; and the ideas of #freeculture #cyberlibertarian and #freespeech cannot be divorced from #freelibresoftware

*(referring to how its colloquially spoken— neither word in "open source" implies or evokes freedom in any way; it sounds more like "source available" than #liberty to me.)

linuxrocks.online/@freedomtux/ ( x.com/esrtweet/status/18868943 ) @esrtweet

LinuxRocks.OnlineJoshua M 🇦🇺 (@freedomtux@linuxrocks.online)https://x.com/esrtweet/status/1886894357451866309 “One of my regrets about my years of being Mr. Famous Guy, when I had maximum leadership leverage, is that I didn't foresee the political threat to open source. I thought it was enough to be apolitical, invite everybody to be part of our development community, and that everybody would continue to keep politics out of the coding. Including even my own libertarian politics. If I had known what was coming, I would have made a big deal about insisting that the open source community had to have one positive political value: free speech and opposition to censorship. That would have been justified on the object level, because we can't function when those political conditions are violated.” — @esrtweet (x.com) @esrtweet@bird.makeup #freesoftware #freeculture #foss #floss #opensource #OSI #freesoftwarefoundation #freelibre #freespeech #censorship #anticensorship #freethought #antiwoke
Continued thread

They posit you can still modify (tune) the distributed models without the training source. You can also modify a binary executable without its source code. Frankly that's unacceptable if we actually care about the human beings using the software.

A key pillar of freedom as it relates to software is reproducibility. The ability to build a tool from scratch, in your own environment, with your own parameters, is absolutely indispensable to both learning how the tool works and changing the tool to better serve your needs, especially if your needs fall on the outskirts of the bell curve.

There's also the issue of auditability. If you can't run the full build process yourself, producing your own results from scratch in a trusted environment to compare with what's distributed, it becomes exponentially harder to verify any claims about how a tool supposedly works.

Without the training data, this all becomes impossible for AI models. The OSI knows this. They're choosing to ignore it for the sake of expediency for the companies paying their bills, who want to claim "open" because it sounds good while actually hiding the (largely stolen and fraudulently or non-consentually acquired) source material of their current models.

Do we want a new definition of "open source" that actively thwarts analysis and tinkering, two fundamental requirements of software that respects human beings today? Reject this nonsense.

As the OSI prepares to make official its "open source AI" definition with a glaring lack of requirement that the actual source (training data) is made available, it's worth noting that their work is funded by google, meta, microsoft, salesforce, etc. What does open source even mean here if the literal source of the model isn't open? These companies are invested in making you think they're on your side while they boil the oceans to avoid paying human beings for labor.

The idea behind open source, as it grew out of the free software movement, has always been to water down software freedoms, to create something more palatable to corporate interests that *sounds* good but means very little. This continues that work for the current "gen AI" bubble. It's time to ditch open source as an ideal, and the OSI especially.

opensource.org/ai/drafts/the-o

#OpenSourceInitiative tries to define #OpenSource #AI
The issue is that there's no accepted way to determine whether or not an AI system is open source, despite the fact that there are already many #machinelearning models offered under open source licenses.
"I think the fundamental problem with AI is that its output is inherently plagiarism," #BrucePerens explained "#LLM are trained from websites, and open source software, without regard for their copyright."
theregister.com/2024/05/16/ope