Until further notice

So, I've decided to take my work back underground

To stop it falling into the wrong hands

The above quote is from the Intro track on The Prodigy's second album, Music for the Jilted Generation. A record which, on the inner sleeve, has the above iconic artwork by Les Edwards.

With the current "AI" hype train running on full steam, free and open source software has met a challenge that the licences we have been relying on for ages do not have a good answer to or defence against. It's very encouraging to see places like Codeberg taking a stance against "AI". But as long as the source code is still open it is unfortunately also exploitable for "AI" training, no matter how loud we say no, despite it obviously being abuse behavior by the "AI" companies.

I just finished going through my profiles and groups on GitLab and the data.coop Forgejo and made sure to make all repositories private that don't need to be public. It's a pity. I have been believing in the value of open source for decades (and still do). But I don't want my code to be used as training material for LLMs against my will.

This is of course something I should have done a long time ago. The damage has, to a large extend, already been done. But I will no longer let this happen. Until I, or someone smarter than me, come up with a solution, things will remain private.

Maybe the solution – at least temporarily – is to work together in private places, where the bots and crawlers can't scrape our free (not as in beer) work and feed it to the slop gigafactories of hypercapitalism. Because I do want to work together with others. Other people.