- 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.