The way I see it is, and not saying this isn’t a valid concern, it that it still doesn’t help with code maintenance. Just cause you can create it doesn’t mean you can maintain it. Many companies moved to open source (not free software) cause of the financial incentives of security and long term maintainability of the codebase. Think of how much better say tensorflow and pytorch got because it was opensource. The engineers of Google and meta could make it what were their reasons for open sourcing it? I doubt these reasons have changed with ai. Cause nothing beats free Q&A testing.

This is a fast path to open source irrelevancy, since the US copyright office has deemed LLM outputs to be uncopyrightable.

This is a misunderstanding of US Copyright. Here’s a link to the compendium so you can verify for yourself.

Section 313 says “Although uncopyrightable material, by definition, is not eligible for copyright protection, the Office may register a work that contains uncopyrightable material, provided that the work as a whole contains other material that qualifies as an original work of authorship…”

This means that LLM created code that’s embedded in a larger work may be registered.

Section 313.2 says “Similarly, the Office will not register works produced by a machine or mere mechanical process that operates randomly or automatically without any creative input or intervention from a human author.”

Meaning that LLM created code CAN be registered as long as an author has some creative input or intervention in the process. I’d posit that herding an LLM system to create the code definitely qualifies as “creative input or intervention”. If someone feels it isn’t then all they need to do is change something, literally anything, and suddenly it becomes a derivative work of an uncopyrighted source and the derivative can then be registered (to a human) and be subject to copyright.

In short, it’s fine. Take a breath.

This is a fast path to open source irrelevancy, since the US copyright office has deemed LLM outputs to be uncopyrightable.

Open source != copyrighted. Public domain source code is also open source.

I hate this trend I see of the FOSS movement retreating from the foundational principle that it started on: Free Sharing of Software.

Not shareware, not ‘libre but not gratis’, not ‘buy me a coffee to get access to the code on my patreon’, not ‘free to look at but not to use as source code’: free period. Libre and gratis.

These non-lawyers traipsing in to make claims about the effect of AI on open source licensing are giving me big “I release my code but only if I can 1) get paid for it and 2) control who and how it’s used” vibes. That’s what’s ‘hollowing-out’ open source.

value leaks out of the project

What value? Value to whom? The value of source code is what it does, i.e. the program it compiles or is interpreted into. That doesn’t change by someone else using it differently than you. Google taking Linux and spinning off Android doesn’t “hurt” Linux. It doesn’t decrease the ‘value’. There’s no universal counter out there that says, “this GPLv2 attribution appears more than someone else’s, so therefore this project is more valuable”, that is being eroded if a company goes and uses it without reprinting the license notice as well. OSS licenses have never prevented that.

I said it before the last time FOSS came up, and I’ll say it again:

FOSS is about propagating software to as many people as possible, to help as many people as possible. It’s not about creating legal barriers to diminish the power of corporations; making tools available to people that are better and cheaper will do that naturally (and you were never going to beat the corpo lawyers anyways trying to enforce licenses).

If your zeal to prevent corporations from ever misusing FOSS leads you to remove some aspect of it (free, open, or source), then you’ve cut off your nose to spite your face.