28 Aug
2025
28 Aug
'25
2:26 a.m.
On Thu, 28 Aug 2025 at 00:00, Elle <elle+xmpp-standards(a)weathered-steel.dev>
wrote:
- IANAL, but the use of any of the XSF materials is covered by our IPR
statement and I believe that explicitly allows any such use as training
LLMs. I don't see this as a negative for the XSF. This doesn't negate
concerns for *other* organizations or projects.
I understand that given the licensing, LLM training may be permissible.
That wasn't the point. As an org, and personally, I do not want to
contribute to a technology largely designed to destroy my profession.
Unfortunately, a number of projects I care about are still hosted on
platform owned by one of the biggest developers of LLM tech.
You mentioned before that contributors are free to mirror XSF/XMPP repos
on other platforms. This sounds like a good first contribution for our org.
I'm willing to put in the work to mirror the repos, and try to coordinate
any issue triage that gets submitted on the mirrors.
Absolutely, go for it. But at the moment, the bulk of the effort has gone
into supporting our use of Github, so unless there's real critical mass in
what you're attempting, you may find it results in no change.
- It is very demotivating for people working on this to get side line
opinions without actual ongoing involvement.
Apologies if this sounded like sidelining, that wasn't my intention. I was
giving voice from my perspective on why *I* am demotivated from
contributing to projects hosted on Github, and offered some viable
alternatives.
And I get that. But I also get that Github is easy to find, and saves the
(overworked) team a lot of work. Github isn't great, but burn-out is far
worse.
- I will not go into my personal opinions on political, societal, or
ethical choices or opinions, by anyone or any corporation, here. I do have
them, as many here can attest, and they usually go with a beverage in a
private, in-person setting.
Right, because FOSS, decentralized communication platforms are completely
apolitical, and detached from society. There's obviously no ethical
considerations, either. Mind backdooring OMEMO for any government that asks?
The technology does what the technology does.
Some people might (probably do) use OMEMO to hide unethical and illegal
things from governments, too. Governments themselves use XMPP for all kinds
of things, and I'm sure that you may well have opinions on which of those
are ethically aligned with your beliefs.
The communications platform *is* apolitical. It does not distinguish
between "bad" things (like enabling C&C systems for malware) and
"good"
things (like rapid triage of pressure sores). So people use it for both.
What you (or I) choose to support is up to us - the protocol has no views,
and I'm broadly with Ralph on saying that carries over to the XSF.
And to be sure, I can't see myself engaging if a bunch of malware authors
started working on improvements to the protocol to support their use cases,
and if governments started asking for backdoors in OMEMO, I assume you'd
not help them either. But they're welcome to try, I suppose.
Dave.