My open source project was relicensed by a YC company [license updated]

One starts to wonder whether the LLM vendors laissez-faire approach to the legality of ingesting copyrighted / licensed material will start to infect the industry in general?

I think it will push opensource/ free software hackers to close source their code because it is being used to feed LLMs. Similar to how allot of hardcore free software proponents don't use Github. Is closed source the future?

> Is closed source the future?

No. I don't believe that. I personally want my code to outlast me and help people in the future, but I don't want allow anyone to just scrape it, strip its license and use for whatever. I use (A)GPLv3+, because I believe in "Freedom for the user", not "Freedom for the developer" which permissive licenses provide.

My code is not free labor for anyone. It has conditions attached.

This is the problem that AI solves, though: rather than steal our code directly, now the thieves will just ask their favorite AI to generate a new project that does exactly what our (A)GPLv3+ projects did, which it will be able to do only because it read our code. And, even if the result is eerily similar to what we publish -- we might, after all, be one of the few good examples in the training set for this problem -- it will be difficult to demonstrate, as the AI is more effective at the process of laundering licenses than a human (and no one seems to want to admit that, the same way that a human can be tainted by reading the source code of a project they want to reimplement -- making them have to walk a tightrope if they later want to develop anything similar -- an AI might be similarly tainted). In this shitty new world, our code, is, in fact, free labor for people who are using Cursor to rip it off.

Ouch!

I believe in OSS. But damn. I had not really considered this move.

I had a stray thought and that is most SI content I have looked at has watermarks of a sort. Perhaps this could be used?

I dunno, even after considering that move, I'll continue to publish FOSS like before.

I always did it without any expectation of gains from it, and with the intention for people to use it for whatever they want. That calculation hasn't changed, even considering machines will slurp it up now.

I do agree that it sucks for people who do care about what the code is used for, and I hope these people migrate to other licenses that support their ideas about control and ownership.

I will do the same. I am aligned with ESR basically, as expressed in "The Clue Train Manifesto."

Use value of OSS remains high. Because of that, when I can add to the body of OSS, I do. People will do what they do.

All I control is me. They do them.

We all benefit from the high use value.

I do wish those who have made fortunes would contribute more and keep their roots, and the labor of many high quality humans just a bit more firmly in mind.