As soon as I learned that genAI companies were inhaling everything publicly available, this was my response. I removed all my code (and websites, blog, etc.) from the public internet and no longer use permissive licenses.
Doing it was a bit painful, a loss, and psychologically difficult. But I couldn't think of any other way to protect myself from further abuse. I still can't. If/when a real solution becomes available, I'll do that instead.
I do still share my code, my websites, etc. I just made everything no longer publicly accessible and am selective about allowing access.
I wrote this article not because I'm sure about the position and not because I want to celebrate the situation. I come from the camp who believed that open source is super beneficial and a positive movement (and to express the counter view is difficult for me).
I'm just puzzled and confused: why is the open source community not furious with this situation as musicians and visual artists are? Why is it considered OK to continue feeding the machine with such a small push back from the open source communities?
> I come from the camp who believed that open source is super beneficial and a positive movement
As do I. I've been very active in OSS for many years, because of the clear (to me) positive benefits it has for everyone. That's why it was hard and painful to retreat from it. I felt (and still feel) that my hand was forced.
> why is the open source community not furious with this situation
I'm not sure, but I do know that the OSS community has changed from what it used to be. Perhaps there's not as much of a unified mission or purpose as with the fine arts communities? Perhaps (and I slightly lean this direction) the OSS community has different ideals now that are more compatible with this? Perhaps it's a sense of resignation?
I don't know. It's an interesting question.
I do know that there are quite a few OSS folk who are, in fact, furious. It's just not an obvious majority of them, and most of the upset ones I've talked with have a sense that there's nothing they can do about it without withdrawing like I have. Their calculation is that it's still a net good to continue even with this problem.
I'm not sure the author understands how AI learns. At this point, the fundamental "coding" knowledge is baked in, leaving little to "learn" from more code examples. The real power that coding models have comes from reasoning, testing code, and having broader integration into hardware to develop it. In other words, we've already zipped past the transfer learning phase of learning how to code.
I agree that better reasoning, testing, and agentic tooling matter, but coding models still benefit from new, high-quality code and real-world coding tasks. Software also keeps changing: new APIs, frameworks, languages, vulnerabilities, and engineering patterns appear constantly. I'm skeptical that “Coding knowledge is already baked in” is supported by the evidence.
What is the evidence that the models are already past the "transfer learning phase of learning how to code" more than they are past the "transfer learning phase of learning how to produce high quality animation or music?". The fact that code is produced is not enough evidence that "machines can't learn more from human work".
In other words: What evidence shows that code has uniquely reached data saturation? As far as I know, existing controlled studies still show gains from additional and better-targeted code training and I'm not aware of studies that demonstrate the opposite.
1. Companies will revert to closed-source and cease contributions to F/OSS projects. Their legal team will advise them that trade secrets are the only way to protect LLM-generated code.
2. Contributors to F/OSS projects, and developers who run them, will falsely claim authorship of the code written by LLMs.
These are already the most common reactions to the current legal status of LLM-generated works. If it is "uncopyrightable" and goes into the Public Domain or equivalent, then the F/OSS ideology will be considered untenable, except where software is exclusively written by hand.
This is one major reason that Codeberg, Linux, and other projects have said "no AI contributions or repos", because there is no value in being a Public-Domain-Dumping-Ground. If there is no copyright to assign, sublicense, or transfer, then there is no value in the content to any hosting service.
This is an excellent point. OSS licenses only work because of copyright. The intention was to kind of "judo" copyright law to benefit sharing. If the work is uncopyrightable, no license of any sort applies to it.
Before I started running with the OSS crowd, I wanted to put my code in the public domain. I quickly learned that isn't a thing with US copyright law. Any time you create a new work (of the sort that isn't specifically excluded from copyright) it is immediately and automatically copyrighted by you in that instant. If you don't want it to be, tough. It's copyrighted. The best you could do was apply a permissive license.
But now, perhaps there's a workaround for those who really want to be something they made in the public domain: claim it was machine generated. There's an interesting thought...
As soon as I learned that genAI companies were inhaling everything publicly available, this was my response. I removed all my code (and websites, blog, etc.) from the public internet and no longer use permissive licenses.
Doing it was a bit painful, a loss, and psychologically difficult. But I couldn't think of any other way to protect myself from further abuse. I still can't. If/when a real solution becomes available, I'll do that instead.
I do still share my code, my websites, etc. I just made everything no longer publicly accessible and am selective about allowing access.
I wrote this article not because I'm sure about the position and not because I want to celebrate the situation. I come from the camp who believed that open source is super beneficial and a positive movement (and to express the counter view is difficult for me).
I'm just puzzled and confused: why is the open source community not furious with this situation as musicians and visual artists are? Why is it considered OK to continue feeding the machine with such a small push back from the open source communities?
> I come from the camp who believed that open source is super beneficial and a positive movement
As do I. I've been very active in OSS for many years, because of the clear (to me) positive benefits it has for everyone. That's why it was hard and painful to retreat from it. I felt (and still feel) that my hand was forced.
> why is the open source community not furious with this situation
I'm not sure, but I do know that the OSS community has changed from what it used to be. Perhaps there's not as much of a unified mission or purpose as with the fine arts communities? Perhaps (and I slightly lean this direction) the OSS community has different ideals now that are more compatible with this? Perhaps it's a sense of resignation?
I don't know. It's an interesting question.
I do know that there are quite a few OSS folk who are, in fact, furious. It's just not an obvious majority of them, and most of the upset ones I've talked with have a sense that there's nothing they can do about it without withdrawing like I have. Their calculation is that it's still a net good to continue even with this problem.
I'm not sure the author understands how AI learns. At this point, the fundamental "coding" knowledge is baked in, leaving little to "learn" from more code examples. The real power that coding models have comes from reasoning, testing code, and having broader integration into hardware to develop it. In other words, we've already zipped past the transfer learning phase of learning how to code.
Perhaps, but IMHO that’s too strong a claim.
I agree that better reasoning, testing, and agentic tooling matter, but coding models still benefit from new, high-quality code and real-world coding tasks. Software also keeps changing: new APIs, frameworks, languages, vulnerabilities, and engineering patterns appear constantly. I'm skeptical that “Coding knowledge is already baked in” is supported by the evidence.
What is the evidence that the models are already past the "transfer learning phase of learning how to code" more than they are past the "transfer learning phase of learning how to produce high quality animation or music?". The fact that code is produced is not enough evidence that "machines can't learn more from human work".
In other words: What evidence shows that code has uniquely reached data saturation? As far as I know, existing controlled studies still show gains from additional and better-targeted code training and I'm not aware of studies that demonstrate the opposite.
Two trends to watch in coming months/years:
1. Companies will revert to closed-source and cease contributions to F/OSS projects. Their legal team will advise them that trade secrets are the only way to protect LLM-generated code.
2. Contributors to F/OSS projects, and developers who run them, will falsely claim authorship of the code written by LLMs.
These are already the most common reactions to the current legal status of LLM-generated works. If it is "uncopyrightable" and goes into the Public Domain or equivalent, then the F/OSS ideology will be considered untenable, except where software is exclusively written by hand.
This is one major reason that Codeberg, Linux, and other projects have said "no AI contributions or repos", because there is no value in being a Public-Domain-Dumping-Ground. If there is no copyright to assign, sublicense, or transfer, then there is no value in the content to any hosting service.
This is an excellent point. OSS licenses only work because of copyright. The intention was to kind of "judo" copyright law to benefit sharing. If the work is uncopyrightable, no license of any sort applies to it.
Before I started running with the OSS crowd, I wanted to put my code in the public domain. I quickly learned that isn't a thing with US copyright law. Any time you create a new work (of the sort that isn't specifically excluded from copyright) it is immediately and automatically copyrighted by you in that instant. If you don't want it to be, tough. It's copyrighted. The best you could do was apply a permissive license.
But now, perhaps there's a workaround for those who really want to be something they made in the public domain: claim it was machine generated. There's an interesting thought...
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