My take on the article

• If it was written by AI, the author should have done a manual pass to simplify it and make it more approachable
• If it was not written by AI, the author should probably have asked AI to review for readability

Either way, the article was done in such a way that it is hard to read. It also misses

• Why should I care about this?
• Why does this matter?

At least those things were missing early on in the article. I scanned through it, but the article did not seem to take into account explaining why one should spend cycles reading this.

If you have any thoughts of making any money of the code that may be a reason to give the license some thought. Anything else, these days, is just a LLM away from getting re-written regardless of whatever license you use. For example there is a service that takes any code, uses one agent to create requirements and another to use those requirements to create a comparable program; the claim is that the second agent did not “steal” your code since it purely worked off requirements. Sure, it likely won’t be as good, but it allows someone to take a significant part of your code for themselves. That was, more or less, always there in the past is just that now is near trivial to do.

Also, there are projects that are just fake open source. Like a project I saw yesterday with a restrictive license, but then has a CLA.

• AGPL restrictive copyleft license – good
• CLA (Contributor License Agreement) — a legal agreement where you grant the project maintainers additional rights over your contribution, often including the right to relicense it under different terms – not good

So, that project at first sight appears like it is open, but because of the CLA the authors may just take whatever contributions you do to the project and then change it’s license.

I think this article Agentic coding impact on oss is related. In this case the author is outright saying “don’t submit PRs”, but in many other cases authors are not catching up with PRs so people just fork.

All in all, I think the impact of LLMs in open source will likely be significant over time.

The Forum Login is in the top right of every page (if the menu is not expanded, it will simply be an icon

The way to expand the right vertical bar is in the bottom left corner… not particularly intuitive. I would recommend to have login and register in the top row line. I can’t remember ever seeing another site where I literally did not notice the login / register options even though they were there, as in this site. 🙄

it felt like there was too much room for abuse or issues There will be people and entities that will try to abuse, not matter what the policy is

closed licensed projects could also cause legal issues Not sure what you are referring to, but open source software can also cause legal issues. Someone could take code from work and try to open source, someone could take another open source project’s code and try to pass it as their own, etc… etc…

companies will no longer publish the source code for their projects

100%

Whereas, before a company may contribute something they created for internal use and they may have put something to try and stop direct competitors from using it (like restrictions only for cloud providers) now they probably will just not publish at all.

Im not a big fan of fake open source, but source available is better than closed source.

To be fair, some of the “fake open source” was a result of some projects seeing their projects taken by a cloud provider, charging for it and not contributing ANYTHING back to the original project. Can’t really say I blame them.

Quick observation. I think would be helpful to have a login button somewhere instead of one having to get all the way down to a topic. Also, what if I wanted to see everything new for a category instead for a single topic? Anything like that supported yet?

Are you writing anywhere about how you are doing this? Tech stack, team members, etc…

New project submissions, such as https://unfinishedprojects.net/wiki/Special:FormEdit/Submit_Project, should be behind login. Otherwise, eventually, you will get lots of spam registrations.

Lastly, when I see this “The Libre Community” makes me think that this would be even nicer if it was for all creators… think solopreneurs who may be trying to create a SAAS. Those are a group of people who may be primarily consumers of open source, but they can provide great feedback and also be early adopters of anyone trying to create a new open source software.

require the training data to be shared to prove it was never exposed to the original source

I believe there have been lawsuits which have already proven these models stole, and can reproduce verbatim, copyrighted material yet there has been little to no real consequences for the AI companies. So, if they can get away with that from companies that actually have the means to present a strong lawsuit, the chances of some open source author to defend their code are slim (very slim in my opinion)

I thought there are some licenses that prohibit cloud providers from using the software and offering it as a service. In those cases even though the software may not be leaving the “Author” machines, it would still be a refactor of software that otherwise the cloud provider would not have been able to run legally under the old license.

Copyright law only has teeth when it’s owned by corporations,

100%. It is funny how any individual can be sued for copying a handful, of pretty much anything copyrighted, yet these AI companies copy literally thousands upon thousands of copyrighted materials.

cleanroom reimplementing technique does still seem to create a derivative product

Will likely have to wait for a case to go to trial, but in theory at least, it is possible these clean room implementations may pass a legal challenge. The youtube video I was watching about this topic had phoenix technologies as an example (for those of us old enough to remember what that company was). In their case it was even more so; they took a commercial piece of software and reverse engineered. If that is possible, then doing similar to an open source software may be considered legal, but again we probably won’t know until something like this comes to courts. Different countries may also treat this differently so we will have to wait and see.

The “good” news is this is pretty rare these days.

Sadly yes. But even those that don’t make money, or much money, must feel demoralized when someone steals their code.