i wonder if part of the reason why generative AI has seemingly infiltrated FOSS circles so much despite, in many ways, being against the ethos of free software, is because of a difference of perception

"free software" as the basic concept appeared at a time where a program was more of a singular thing -- often written in C or some easily available interpreted language, relying on a few common libraries and the OS's system calls, and was small enough that the concept of a program being "complete" or "finished", requiring no further development, was still viable

these days, most software is different -- it uses lots of libraries either statically or dynamically, is developed continuously in response to user demand or bugs/security issues that needs fixing, often requires deliberate maintenance to either keep working, or to stay ahead of the competition...

for the people who believe in the earlier concept, the idea of using a third-party service or even some open-weights model to develop a piece of open-source software doesn't strike them as crossing any red line, because the software developed at the end of it is still open-source (and from their point of view, if using proprietary software to develop free software is wrong, then the entire GNU project is an error)

whereas folks with the newer mindset see a piece of software as something that needs constant maintenance and, for them, surrendering part of that maintenance to a service that can shut down at any moment, or one that creates hard-to-maintain code that would motivate continued use of AI models or agents, makes the resulting software not that different from proprietary software it's based on (and, like, sure, it's theoretically possible to take a generated program and improve it by hand, but who would take on all that effort? especially since no human would have an understanding of the code they're working on) -- especially when most AI research is concentrated into the hands of a few big tech companies, usually the kind that people want to move away from when developing open-source software