If you fork an open source project and nuke the git history, that's considered to be a "dick move" because you are erasing the record of people's contributions.

LLMs are doing this on an industrial scale.

Exactly that. And all the books about, for instance, operating systems, totally based on the work of others: their ideas where collected and documented, the exact algorithms, and so forth. All the human culture worked this way. Moreover there is a strong pattern of the most prolific / known open source developers being NOT against the fact that their code was used for training: they can't talk for everybody but it is a signal that for many this use is within the scope of making source code available.

You can say that about literally everything, yet we have robust systems for protecting intellectual property, anyway.

> I don't think it's possible to separate any open source contribution from the ones that came before it, as we're all standing on the shoulders of giants. Every developer learns from their predecessors and adapts patterns and code from existing projects.

Yes but you can also ask the developer (wheter in libera.irc, or say if its a foss project on any foss talk, about which books and blogs they followed for code patterns & inspirations & just talk to them)

I do feel like some aspects of this are gonna get eaten away by the black box if we do spec-development imo.