Yes, the people are still there. We're #dispirited about the whole thing, but we want to take it back.
I've been thinking about this, and it seems to me one of the core problems is that we deliberately made our commons #stealable - and I mean before they started shoving our work into the slop machine's training. Our software #licenses by and large let them run our software for profit with no need to feed changes, improvements, or their individual Secret Sauce addons back to us.
And I think the #OSI's Open Source Definition (#OSD) is the core of that. We all wanted to be maximally free with our licenses, in general. The difference between a GPL-like license and an MIT-like license look big to us, but everything OSD-compliant is tucked away in a corner of the graph. The real variation is outside the OSD - way outside.
I think we may have to start #rebuilding by fundamentally rethinking our #licensing. "Free for any use" is "freedom to #exploit the #creators and #maintainers". Licenses that forbid certain uses, that forbid locking the software up behind a web API, that forbid locking users / customers into using one particular provider's hosting because their Secret Sauce is proprietary and incompatible, maybe licenses that forbid re-distribution of certain types of #modifications...
We may need to build a new #commons, and in a way that does not allow the vampires-with-lawyers to destroy it all again.
<thinking still in progress>
