The glaring double standard between how big tech treats your code versus their code:

- When they steal code from your repository (or directly from your IDE as part of telemetry data): "this is fair use" or "it is transformative synthesis". Or they'll make grandiose claims such as "this is the inevitable path of human technological progress".

- If you try to take from them (remember that courts lean towards AI output not having copyright protection, it is public domain): you get sued to oblivion on trade secrets or EULA violation.

#OpenSource #FreeSoftware #FOSS #Copyright #Law #IntellectualProperty #GPL #AI #LLM #SoftwareDevelopment #Agentic #Coding #CodingAgent #bigtech #FOSS_LLM

Is Open Source licensing meaningful anymore, or are we just left with public domain?

What are the legal distinctions between GPL, Apache, and MIT when AI companies and LLMs ignore the LICENSE file of your project? There's no license text that they will respect and nothing will stop the automated, industrial-scale strip mining of our intellectual property.

#OpenSource #FreeSoftware #FOSS #Copyright #Law #GPL #AI #LLM #SoftwareDevelopment #Agentic #Coding #CodingAgent #FOSS_LLM

Microsoft Won.

In the beginning, Steve Ballmer famously called Linux a "cancer" because its copyleft mechanism threatened Microsoft's proprietary software license margins. They tried to destroy it with FUD. They lost because open source's community-driven distribution velocity was unstoppable.

Then, Microsoft pivoted. They bought GitHub. It was an acquisition of a software supply chain.

And now, Microsoft extinguishes: they use an LLM to launder the logic of GitHub repositories, rendering the licenses written inside of them completely toothless. By making the code inside a repository something that can be synthesized on demand, Microsoft shifts the economic leverage away from developers and locks it into the platform that can host and generate code.

#Microsoft #Linux #GitHub #OpenSource #AI #LLM #SoftwareDevelopment #Agentic #Coding #CodingAgent #FOSS_LLM

The Erasure of Attribution (MIT / BSD / Apache licenses)

Permissive licenses ask for very little, often just a single copyright notice or an AUTHORS file preserved in the documentation.

When an LLM ingests this repository, the authorship data is stripped. The model retains the ability to reproduce the exact algorithmic patterns, but the identity of the human creator is dissolved. The requirement for attribution is not respected.

#OpenSource #AI #LLM #SoftwareDevelopment #Agentic #Coding #CodingAgent #FOSS_LLM

The Death of Reciprocity (Free Software licenses)

The core of the license is that of a "derivative work". Anyone building on your Free Software is legally compelled to publish (reciprocate) their modifications.

An LLM coding agent breaks this idea by treating all software as a statistical probability matrix. The direct textual lineage disappears. The derivation becomes difficult or impossible to prove.

#OpenSource #FreeSoftware #AI #LLM #SoftwareDevelopment #Agentic #Coding #CodingAgent #FOSS_LLM