I really don't get those takes. AI is the best thing that ever happened to the Free Software world, it is basically turning any software into Free Software. You can just throw file formats, protocols or even plain binaries at the AI and it'll reverse engineer everything in a pinch. Users can finally modify software themselves, which was always the goal of the Free Software world, but very rarely happened in actuality, since it was just so damn complicated. AI lowered the barrier of entry tremendously, not just in terms of required knowledge, but especially time. Same with Creative Commons, sharing art and stuff, was a nice gesture, but rarely useful, since the level of work to modify a work to fit your project was pretty close to just doing it from scratch anyway. With AI everybody can toy around with image generators and get what they want.
Is a social contract being broken? Yeah, kind of, but the problems that that contract existed to solve are no longer a thing. Creation is now easy and commodified. We finally have computer we can interact with in natural language, something people tried to do for at least 70 years and never made any significant progress on until LLM arrived.
If you want to gatekeep or only create stuff to boost your own ego or portfolio, then AI might be an issue, if you actually want to build stuff, AI is godsend. We are essentially living in the StarTrek future with Holodecks and replicators and people still find reason to complain.
> ... it is basically turning any software into Free Software.
And the opposite is true, as well. Many groups with deep pockets are rewriting Free Software packages with permissive licenses to kill the GPL counterparts, so the companies can sell closed source software built on the effort of thousands.
So it's not all pink fluffy unicorns dancing on rainbows.
You implement something essential in a different programming language, tout that it's better than its GPL counterpart, and lobby for a change.
For me, the biggest example is uutils. Started as a "homework", then turned into a "hobby project", then turned into a complete Rust rewrite of the GNU Coreutils. It even once touted they were planning to replace all util-linux as well. When you look into uutil org, it's a systemd-like project with tons of sub-projects.
For the lobby part, the same project touts "Debian might switch, soon". Debian-developers got angry, created a pull request to remove that line from the site, it just got denied, and the maintainer lashed out "This is my site, this is my project, don't bug me". The relevant thread starts at [0].
This is not always with AI, but companies can use AI to license-wash something with a "reverse engineer this, and reimplement it in X" type of prompts.
Chardet has been relicensed in a hostile manner as well [1] [2].
grumbel · · focus · HN ↗
Is a social contract being broken? Yeah, kind of, but the problems that that contract existed to solve are no longer a thing. Creation is now easy and commodified. We finally have computer we can interact with in natural language, something people tried to do for at least 70 years and never made any significant progress on until LLM arrived.
If you want to gatekeep or only create stuff to boost your own ego or portfolio, then AI might be an issue, if you actually want to build stuff, AI is godsend. We are essentially living in the StarTrek future with Holodecks and replicators and people still find reason to complain.
bayindirh · · focus · HN ↗
And the opposite is true, as well. Many groups with deep pockets are rewriting Free Software packages with permissive licenses to kill the GPL counterparts, so the companies can sell closed source software built on the effort of thousands.
So it's not all pink fluffy unicorns dancing on rainbows.
warkdarrior · · focus · HN ↗
bayindirh · · focus · HN ↗
For me, the biggest example is uutils. Started as a "homework", then turned into a "hobby project", then turned into a complete Rust rewrite of the GNU Coreutils. It even once touted they were planning to replace all util-linux as well. When you look into uutil org, it's a systemd-like project with tons of sub-projects.
For the lobby part, the same project touts "Debian might switch, soon". Debian-developers got angry, created a pull request to remove that line from the site, it just got denied, and the maintainer lashed out "This is my site, this is my project, don't bug me". The relevant thread starts at [0].
This is not always with AI, but companies can use AI to license-wash something with a "reverse engineer this, and reimplement it in X" type of prompts.
Chardet has been relicensed in a hostile manner as well [1] [2].
[0]: <a href="https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2026/06/msg00315.html" rel="nofollow">https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2026/06/msg00315.html
[1]: <a href="https://github.com/chardet/chardet/issues/327" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/chardet/chardet/issues/327
[2]: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47259177">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47259177