Comment by Gormo

> It sounds like your view of things is limited mostly to that last version of FOSS, the copyleft style.

No, I'm well aware of the different motivations for and approaches to FOSS. I'm mostly focusing on the copyleft/GNU GPL side of the discussion here because that's the side of the house where most of ideas of a social contract and desire to see a specific ecosystem develop have been located. People on the MIT/BSD side of things, which has always had a much more direct "do whatever you want" ethos, are not the ones I'd expect to be making these arguments in the first place.

> For one, it allows laundering of the copyleft license so their work goes into closed-source products that are never shared.

I'd agree that someone using an LLM to create a deterministic transcription of someone else's work is indeed violating the license. But I think the argument goes beyond that, into using LLMs in any way at all.

> That doesn't mean I will be writing OSS software with a new made-up unenforceable license. It just means, like OP, I'll weigh differently whether I want to bother releasing stuff at all.

That's a reasonable position, and from the perspective of examining whether the current LLM climate is sapping motivation to participate in FOSS, I can understand where you're coming from.

But to that point, I'd argue that if your motivation was to gain recognition, participate in a community, etc. then you're going to lose those things by keeping your code private anyway, whereas you won't necessarily lose those things just because an LLM was trained on your code. If you contribute to a popular project, people were almost certainly already using your work to do things you don't approve of -- if that didn't take away your motivation, why would LLMs do much worse?