Let Us Be Free

Nearly half a century ago, the free software movement made a demand that was both technical and moral: Users should have the freedom to understand, run, modify, and share the software on which they depended. It was a demand born from practical life with machines. A printer that couldn't be fixed. A program that couldn't be studied. A system that asked its users to accept dependence as the price of progress. That belief shaped modern computing and gave us the tools and norms that made the internet, open infrastructure, and collaborative software development possible. Today, that belief faces its hardest test. The technology has changed, but the warning signs are familiar. In 1980, at the MIT AI Laboratory in Cambridge, Massachusetts, a new Xerox 9700 printer was installed. The previous printer had come with source code that could be modified, inspected, recompiled, and reinstalled. Richard Stallman had changed that software to message users when their print job was done or when there was a jam, a small but meaningful feature since the printer sat several floors away. The new printer arrived with software preloaded and installed, no source code available, no way to modify it. If you needed help or new features, you hoped and prayed Xerox would listen. That loss of agency, alongside other anti-consumer shifts in early software, helped push him toward GNU and the free software movement: the belief that software should be free as in freedom, free to inspect, run, study, modify, understand, and redistribute. AI and inference services today are not too dissimilar. Closed frontier intelligence can make entire companies, governments, developers, and communities dependent on systems they cannot inspect, reproduce, modify, or meaningfully contest. At the dawn of this AI moment, we were promised unfettered intelligence across our products, companies, and codebases. We were told we'd be free to build whatever we wanted. At first, with tab completions. Then whole function blocks.