> whilst making billions for their shareholders

> I am yet to see this trickle down

hmm...these two sentences don't agree with each other.

I really would like to believe that GPL is the answer here but I know it won’t change anything for them. If they can steal and destroy books, nothing will ever stop them.

We need to go beyond GPL and have the government invest in public software programs.

The idea that advertisers and malware merchants are good stewards of the browser or email or social media needs to end. Especially when said tech leaders hold deeply anti-human beliefs.

If LLMs aren't an example of trickle down, I don't know what is

Paying for something that has been scraped, trained on hundreds of billions of lines of code (mixed up GPL and other licenses) and being resold back to you is trickle down?

Paying 20$ per month to double my productivity, answer many of my health questions with good accuracy, help me with DIY projects around the house and do almost as good of a job as a psychotherapist is trickle down for me.

And you don't even have to pay - there are perfectly fine free tiers and open weight models.

I am pretty sure that the whole open source ideology was developed and disseminated exactly by a cartel of those massive corporations with the sole intention to amass as much human-written code as possible to train AI.

AI algorithms were developed in 1950s, and what all those vultures were waiting for was a good dataset and enough compute power, which they saw coming in advance.

FSF has been the greatest pro-corporate activist, convincing thousands if not millions of programmers to give away their code.