The implicit arrangement in corporate use and contribution to open source is that everyone benefits. People contribute work and testing that improves libraries and tools that everyone else can use, making all our projects better. This includes corporations, many of which also engage in this mutual benefit by hiring actual developers to back open source projects. I think it’s a brilliant system, huge fan.

Enter LLMs training off that data. It looks similar on the surface, but if you think about the balance of cost and benefit it becomes clear it is no longer balanced. The training algorithms and models are closed source, and come at a hefty usage cost. AI companies saved hundreds of billions of dollars of paying humans to help train their algorithms by taking advantage of an open system that was open on with another kind of balance in mind.

So in short the work was offered for free within a specific kind of relationship. Now a powerful outsider is steamrolling and taking advantage of that existing open dynamic.

I feel like the standard "Free as in Gratis vs. Free as in Freedom" argument doesn't quite explain the issue people have here.

Open-source code still had terms, and AI training was an unfortunate blind spot in those terms. If a human being learned how to code 100% from open-source code, nobody saw a problem if that person went on to write closed-source code.

But it feels fundamentally different when the open-source code is just being fed into a machine that uses absurd amounts of processing until closed-source code comes out the other side. It feels like theft.