I’m not following the VLC example too well. Is France demanding the donations to VLC as revenue, thus hamstringing non-profit opensource software projects? That would seem like poor legislative design. I’d assume we’d want non-profit software development to continue as a practice, and that new tax as implied would potentially require a for-profit model for Opensource software’s survival on the web. Am I reading that wrong?

Its probably mostly because he’s in his 50s and does a desk job for a career.

That is breaking corpo face pretty heavily, imo. Starting with “this is bullshit” as a public-facing figure, in response to a very straighforward anti-AI take is about as meltdown as you can expect from a CEO on social media.

I’m gonna have to put some context here, because Linus’ opinion is alittle more nuanced than written here. I will say i don’t agree with him personally, but I also see where he’s coming from.

In multiple different interviews, now, Linus has lamented trash ai-generated code being pushed at codebases and flooding reviewers, so Linus is acutely aware of the problems caused by irrisponsible AI use. He sees how much people just push out AI slop without ever reviewing it. The thing is, Linus has been maintaining the linux codebase for over two decades now, and I imagine he is very aware of how much humans can pump out garbage code on their own.

He’s gone on the record, though, that he uses AI himself to rapidly create tools for troubleshooting and prototyping structures. As far as i can tell, he still views the final code as being something which should be written by a human, but he sees the value in being able to rapidly produce tools and test different data structure configurations in a few minutes where he’d normally have to jerry rig something together over a matter of hours prior.

I have not heard him weigh in on the environmental impact of LLMs yet, though I imagine he assumes that LLMs will become more efficient in time and that they’ll be less memory-intensive over time, to the point of being run locally on a desktop while still being just as powerful.( this part is one I have serious issue with, but i can’t fault the assumption since this guy literally started his career writing machine code by hand - not assembly, machine code.)