It was great, but the ecosystem is quickly deteriorating and younger people are born in walled gardens.

The EU is destroying open source in Europe thanks to CRA in the name of security.

AI models mostly have crappy licenses that restrict usage. The worst culprit is HuggingFace with Stable Diffusion and OpenRail which is anything but open. It's a "don't be evil license", where evil is defined by HuggingFace but it opens the door to BS like "you're emitting too much CO2, you can't use this".

I'm sure most people at Huggingface are not doing it maliciously, they probably are all 20-something socialists making half a mill a year and they don't care about freedom.

At the same time they're also releasing a bunch of real OSS software under Apache 2.0 (often to go with OpenRail licensed models).

So yeah, we're screwed.

At the same time, I think governments are removing even more freedom that what's happening in software, so I'm kind of busy country hopping and more concerned about not becoming even more of a slave I am right now.