Watching what we charitably call this debate flare up yet again gives me an odd mix of feelings. On the one hand, seeing people I've read and listened to for years heave time, attention, and more typing onto this tire fire evokes deep tragedy. On the other hand, I've been there, casting my own vanities to the bonfire, more than a few times. There's comfort in the familiar heat and glow.
I couldn't escape the waste until I was willing to give up the idea of myself as experienced, as an expert. Until I accepted that time served taught me lessons, but didn't bestow authority. Most people coming into this are new. They relearn what's useful and leave the rest behind. That's part of adaptation. I try to see their point of view.
If you ask a newer coder what "open source" means, they might say "like MIT?" or even just "like GitHub?" If you look "open" up in a good thesaurus, "available" is there. The Initiative---really, whoever's on the board now or later---will never own or effectively police the term "open source", much less "open source AI". And nobody claiming "open source" for good or ill will ever summon on themself the kind of attention or cachet that marketing bauble once commanded, no matter what their license says.
As for fellow oldheads, there's no resolving contradictions between ways we learned to frame these issues, decades ago. Can changes to a license be a solution to the funding problem? Can using freedom terms to buttress a business count as truly open? That bizarre conflict of ontologies won't decide where programming goes in the future, if it ever did. I doubt it will even be won or lost. It will just fade away, like the circumstances that started it.
DHH can kick the anthill. The activists can raise their old hue and cry. It's purely elective, demoded dramatics. The real problems of software politics today aren't expressible in either schema. They can even seem tautologically unsolvable. Meanwhile, we've got new aspirational generalities that aren't expressible in the old ways of speaking. "Sustainability", because many doing good aren't doing so well. "Decentralization", because we're all sharecropping on some platform now.
Sometimes I think the best I can do for the younger generations facing today is just to never impose petty trivia about "the movement" ever again. Never deign imply I know what they should consider important. If "free" and "open" meant something to me, let their inheritors tell me what they mean now, in practice. Tell me about the world they built and left for them.
Maybe I don't have to choose. After all, who reads blogs?