Comment by Isognoviastoma
20 hours ago
Most of FOSS is not a free gift, but asks for some form of repay.
MIT asks for credit. GPL asks or credit and GPL'ing of things built atop. Unlicense is a free gift, but it is a minority.
AI reproduces code while removing credit and copyleft from it and this is the problem.
Exactly like someone else here said, in retrospect he probably just wishes he had chosen a more permissive license now that he has forever received the credit and wants to have his cake and eat it too.
I would want to use the license that does not ask for credit; the only requirement is that any further restrictions are not legally effective (except that, for practical reasons, it is allowed to be relicensed by GPL and AGPL (if you are able to follow all of the requirements of those licenses) in order to combine it with software having such licenses).
> and this is the problem
Why? The software is still there and you can still go choose to use it.
Current social consensus is that copyright exists and one can only use software on conditions stated in license. Thus, proprietary and copyleft have same protection.
Another possible consensus would be that copyright don't exist, and anyone can copy proprietary or copyleft work and improve it. Nobody would be harmed in such situation, original author still have its copy. I would have no problem with such state - but it must be same for everyone, not just FOSS.
If I release something as MIT or Apache, all I want is some credit, either for my own self-satisfaction or for resume fuel.
If a library I wrote was used by BigCo, then I could point to their license file and mention that in a job interview or something. If they have Claude generate something based on my code, they don't put it into their license, I don't get the resume fuel, and my work is unrewarded.
I have gone back and forth about how I feel about AI training on code, and whether I think it's "theft", but my point is that the original code being available is kind of missing the point.