Comment by IshKebab

This is exactly it. The people who release stuff under the GPL do so precisely because they want the software and derivatives to stay free. The software has strings attached; the AI removes them. What's so hard to understand here?

Carmack's argument makes no sense, but I guess it has "Carmack" in it so obviously it must be on the front page of HN.

You hit the nail on the head. It's the same with employees who work for their employer but also want to reuse that code when they go work for other people and don't want to rewrite the exact same thing again. Even though everyone else can benefit from it too, Sean "nothings" Barrett said that's the primary reason for his STB libraries.

https://github.com/nothings/stb

Indeed, many who released source code under the GPL in the past did so with the conviction that the license itself would in some measure protect the source code itself — as source code — from being exploited by commercially entities.

The license was supposed to make derivative work feed back into improving the software itself, not to allow it to be used to create competing software.

Many of those are disappointed with leading free software / open source advocates such as Stallman for not taking a stance against the AI companies' practice.