In the 1980’s, there were no freely available C compilers (I guess Borland was inexpensive, but not free). The GNU C Compiler was the first such. The project focused on being bootstrappable, reproducibility from source with a fixed dependency chain.
Corporates took advantage of GCC, and continue to, but have also been happy that LLVM came along with its permissive licensing. LLVM was a free lunch for GPU deployment, letting corporates customize it to compile shaders without having to release the sources.
In the LLM era of mostly closed weights, closed and pirated datasets and inaccessible compute requirements, what would, or does, an open alternative look like? Or should something else be done?
Actually, it is about commercial value obtained from using GPL’d S/W (I don’t know why any volunteer would have wanted to donate S/W to corporates!). But some of the GPL’y projects atleast had self-interested funding of developers (by, e.g. Redhat). OSS’y S/W has had much less of that.
If you look at steps like the OIN, they tried to share IP amongst corporates rather than costs, so corporates do play along when they have to. Nothing like that happened for GPL’y or OSS’y S/W. LLM training is probably a licensing violation, and also the biggest possible leeching.
Sure, a “normie” using GPL’d S/W is on point, because volunteers donated their skills for that purpose. That part of the commons worked.