AI considered good for Software Freedom

A lot of hay has been made about the fact that FOSS maintainers are overwhelmed by AI slop contributions. There's also a potential problem where AI might not respect copyleft licenses or might be used to just reimplement copyleft software from scratch. But I think this is backwards and that in the long term AI programming can be great for software freedoms.

There are two problems in software freedom: math and tedious labor. AI is making some progress in math but it's annihilating the labor constraint.

Let's take a huge software problem today: there are no good free phone operating systems. As a result everyone carries around a spy device in their pocket. And the reason is just that it's a frustrating moving target of constantly having to reverse-engineer drivers that isn't rewarding enough to attract the kind of people who can do it.

But $400/month of claude opus agents can chug along implementing drivers forever. Opus can implement drivers faster than new hardware can be released. Opus can reimplement any propriety slop blob.

Conclusion: none