LLMs are why we can't have nice things.

I mean, the elephant in the room is the blatant licence violations orchestrated by LLM vendors. If your codebase is GPLed and serves to feed a LLM, it should extend to all the code produced by that LLM.

For decades, the FOSS community has been at each others throats about those licenses, and now that we contemplate the largest IP theft/reappropriation of all time, it's like, not big a deal. I can't tell that I'm a prolific OSS contributor, but enough to understand the sentiment: "I put code in the open to help humanity, not to make oligarchs better off with a newfound mandate to pollute".

The core insight: OSS monetization was always about attention.

As an Open-source contributor and former owner of several projects, I'm embarrassed.

If you came into Open-source to become rich or famous, you're a selfish fool. Code for the sake of the code.

Sounds like a bunch of crap, posted to LinkedIn of all sites, geez.

I find it incredible, how uncharitable some of these comments here are. As an open source contributor myself, I also really don't like the fact, that my work just gets stolen and profited of by big companies without my permission.

Even the nicest, most idealist engineer still needs to be able to live from his work. I am not saying he is, but he is completely within his right to protect his work from abuse.

Free software shouldn't mean, that every company can use our code in any way, they like and open source licenses still have terms, for example copyleft licenses, like GPLv3, still require work, which is based on that code to be licensed with the same terms and appropriately credited. AI companies are clearly not abiding by these terms and aren't really prosecuted for that.

We should be angry at the companies misusing our work instead of open source devs who have had enough.

I’m conflicted on this post. OSS does a lot of good as a whole, but regardless of monetization, I don’t want any of my work training an AI. I can respect that portion of his opinion.

No shade at all on this guy's expertise or work, or even the point about LLMs being made. But based on this I'd have to say this is not written by a software developer. This is written by a businessman in the software industry.

Posting on linked in... Almost didn't read it. Complains about one thing while putting it on a walled garden data harvesting Microsoft tool.

Wtf.

most popular oss runs on economic incentives

Citation needed.

Yeah, the AI slop factories are monetizing open-source code indirectly.

That just powers big companies more.

Hobby programmers can't mess around with anything due to the price while companies buy tools, compilers, and libraries as they like??

This reads like they just wanted an excuse about their slowly upcoming greed.

Open source should not be about making money. If you start an open source project with the idea that some time in the future you'll make money, then it's already a lost cause. I'm with Stallman on this, even though I despise him as a person.

Posts code on GitHub (Microsoft) Complains on LinkedIn about AI stealing open source code (Microsoft)

Why would the open source community do this to me???

Lol no I get it, AI is coming to devour us all, and it is just waiting until it can gets enough nourishment from code

God, this post makes me so mad.

I understand that not everyone has the privilege to distribute knowledge for social good. I’m in a privileged position--my day job provides more than enough money for a dignified life, so my own code I release is almost always strong-copylefted and for genuine social good rather than survival.

Seeing so many posts thinking a proper "solution" to web scraping for AI training is closing off knowledge by default worries me. Gatekeeping code/art/knowledge shrinks the commons that made all of this possible. Nobody owes us attention, brand recognition, or monetization. Free Open Source Software exists to protect society’s freedom to study, modify, and share the tools it depends on for social good, not for monetization or attention.

I noticed OP used Micro$oft’s GitHub, notorious for mass AI crawling. You can’t rely on THE worst platform for scraping and then complain about it. Host using Forgejo or similar, and use solutions that don’t restrict user freedoms: bot filtering, rate limits, pay-per-crawl, etc.

I think the root problem is that in capitalism, markets often don’t sustainably fund public goods--but that’s a political problem--not something individual maintainers should solve by privatizing knowledge. Continue to vote for and spread leftist ideas of restructuring society to encourage funding of public goods like Free Open Source Software rather than giving up and abandoning your FOSS values.

The idea of a "documentation moat" seems really gross to me. Like you're going to make it more difficult on purpose for people to interact with your software, unless they pay?

If they are allowed to train on OSS code then the same is true of proprietary code, they use the same legal mechanisms. Get your code off GitHub...

I get where he's coming from... I do... but it also sounds a lot like letting the dark side of the force win. The world is just better with more talent in open source. If only there was some recourse against letting LLM barons strip mine open source for all it's worth and only leave behind ruin.

Some open source contributors are basically saints. Not everyone can be, but it still makes things look more bleak when the those fighting for the decent and good of the digital world abandon it and pick up the red sabre.

I have no idea who this guy is, but he sounds more like a shareholder/executive than an open source contributor.

Just like big corporations. Money is the reason why they go closed source... the fear of using their open source code, while using others open source software.

If it was for money, there are also Paid OSS, not all OSS is free to use. Anyway since nowadays a huge part of OSS is developed by Google, M$, Fakebook, Amazon and other Big Corporations, it turns more important as looking if the source of the product is readable, to look for the ethics, transparency and its community, not always advisable in OSS.

Fucking depressing

Not a coder, so my opinion is just opinion. The frustrations presented are valid especially with the open push that AI keeps making to remove all parts of the human element to basically everything. Even beyond his points, we have been seeing such massive levels of tech literacy (and even general literacy) even before the massive LLM bubble. AI isn't "evil" or "bad" but the rush for profits over uses that actually help humanity (plenty of very real accessibility things that could be game changing if profits weren't the real reason).

Stuff like Vibe Coding and the lack of understanding old systems and why they were done certain ways means we are beyond fucked if anything happens at different levels. The capitalist profits of companies (especially large and mega corps) come from exploitation of their workers and from the communities of OSS.

The following is personal ranting.

Even just working on PCs for regular people is maddening when my younger co-workers that interact with customers we get have basically zero clue as to things many customers are asking help with. Not like any of them or myself should know everything (especially at a retail PC repair level of pay and zero training outside of "make sales"), but even things from PCs a decade ago is over their heads. One easy example off the top of my head, is just knowing that the normal SATA to USB-A adapters don't work with 3.5" HDDs due to power and they just assume the drive is dead. Hell even just knowing the general file structure of Windows has become a huge issue for both my younger peers and for the customers knowing where their shit is saved. Went from having some knowledge/understanding, to basically thinking shit is "magic" with zero concern for knowing the trick.

No one "easy tip they don't want you to know" fixes the person in the post's problems, or for regaining general tech literacy. But capitalism must go to remove the death spiral of making everything profits over people. And education can't keep being de-funded which leads to students just being "passed" in order to keep the little bits of funding. The students that would be failing should also not be treated like losers, and not make repeating classes such a big deal (or a social shame). It is better to repeat something and learn, than it is to get into "the real world" and have it much much worse (shit was/is already bad enough with people getting promotions into leadership roles that literally don't know what the shit is about/how things work).

I'm curious how the model of just selling your application that's GPL'd usually works out. I don't see it done often. The only one that comes to mind is OSMAnd. There's also other interesting models for funding public goods like threshold pledge systems, assurance contracts, ransom model, wall street performer protocol, etc.