If our politicians are already bought and sold to the point that calling for these industries to be regulated is pointless, then why would politicians listen to our calls for 'open weights by default'.

there is never a shortage of parasitic rent seekers and money changers...

society has yet to find a good way to deal with them but we got this:

Jesus entered the temple courts and drove out all who were buying and selling there. He overturned the tables of the money changers and the benches of those selling doves. “It is written,” he said to them, “‘My house will be called a house of prayer,’ but you are making it ‘a den of robbers.

This is why I said anything built on public work, should be public goods as well.

What if I don't want certain people to build on my work, or to constrain the ways in which the build on it? (Non-commercial, share-alike, attribution, etc. clauses) Should I be able to?

That’s not a good comparison. Crypto was a (bad) solution looking for a problem. GenAI already has use-cases.

I didn't mean to compare the technology -- though there are some similar scam vectors, but that's a different conversation.

I meant that there was a strong contingent of crypto fans back then who were saying -- correctly -- that "the mainstream system is corrupt and wields legislation as a weapon against consumers". But their proposed alternative was a system that removed all regulation, including consumer protections.

I worry that there's a trend in tech circles today that echoes that sentiment when it comes to AI.

I'm also rather disappointed that a substantial group of people who I used to assume I was aligned with -- pirates and open-sourcerers -- turned out to only be there for the free shit and not for the ethos.

An ethos which, to me, is something like: everyone has a right to participate in culture and be a part of the conversation, and everyone has a duty to acknowledge the work that enabled their own and do their best to be a good custodian of the upstream works.