Histomat of F/OSS: We should reclaim LLMs, not reject them
January 16, 2026 Histomat of F/OSS: We should reclaim LLMs, not reject them A few days ago, I came across a blog post titled On FLOSS and training LLMs that articulates a growing frustration within the free and open source software community. The author makes a compelling case about how AI companies demonstrate an utter lack of respect toward F/OSS developers, how they exploit the idealistic tenets of open source licensing, and how the law inadequately protects our work from being used as training fodder for proprietary language models. I found myself nodding along through much of the piece. But I fundamentally disagree with the conclusion. The author’s proposed solution is one of denial and isolation: block the crawlers, withdraw from centralized forges like GitHub, make our work…
