I personally believe that if you are writing Open Source code using an ‘AI’, the morally correct license is the most viral copyleft license possible - AGPL.

(I know you’re judging the em-dash, but this article was fully written by me, a real human)

I used to license all my code as MIT, but with how large corporations have continued to take advantage of and abuse permissive licenses for their own gain I feel it is right to try to restrict their free usage of the code that I produce.

This extends to code that I write with the help of AI tools.

AI Copyright Problems Link to heading

Modern frontier ‘AI’ has been trained on a corpus that includes pretty much everything they can get their grubby hands on. There are currently multiple lawsuits (NYT vs OpenAI, Authors Guild vs OpenAI, Getty Images vs Stability AI, GitHub Copilot litigation, Authors vs Anthropic) against the big labs about this.

Any code you have ever written and uploaded to the internet was surely found and used for training WITHOUT REGARD FOR ITS LICENSING. And for some reason, code coming out the other side of this has its licensing washed, and isn’t copyrightable at all.

This means that any code you have written, whether licensed as GPL, MIT, or FSL, doesn’t matter. They’ve trained on it, stripped away your license, and regurgitated the logic for their own profit.

My Opinion Link to heading

I think it should be acknowledged that these AIs require that full set of knowledge to be viable, but that any individual piece of training data is not worth very much at all.

With a lot of talk of putting people out of work, that means these companies are quite literally taking EVERYONE’s work, and then replacing EVERYONE’s job.

That’s fucking crazy.

I think we need to recognize that these things are functionally a product of all of humanities output, and thus they need to FUCKING PAY FOR IT.

I believe the only way out is for them to be taxed to the gills and the money should be used to fund a Universal Basic Income.

If they’re seriously arguing that their tech will replace all of humanities “white-collar” labor, they need to support the people that they have STOLEN from and are now screwing over.

OSS Licensing Link to heading

Given all of that, I don’t think the code coming out of these things should be made freely available for companies to profit off of. I think that, if the AI companies can wash licensing like this, we as OSS devs should force the output to be as virally shareable as possible.

The input came from all of humanity, so the output should be open to everyone too.

AGPL is the strongest copyleft available, that forces companies to either pay for an exception to the licensing or to release all their code too.

As the Dev in the middle of this system, the right thing to do here is to try to get companies to pay for it and use that money to fund OSS.

I think developers should maintain copyright control of their code through CLA’s, an unfortunate necessity, and then sell exceptions to companies for use of it. Profits from that should go to paying for the devs time and a percentage shifted back to upstream dependencies or general OSS initiatives.

And I think projects should publish how they allocate money to themselves and to others.

Money Where My Mouth is Link to heading

I personally make no money from OSS today, but I give a pretty decent amount. If that ratio were to flip, I would take at least 10% of my incoming and allocate it to sending upstream the the things I use.

Here is the list of OSS/coding adjacent projects that I give money to, including an estimate of the total.

Right now I am giving ~$600 a year to various projects. It’s not a lot, but it’s ~$600 more than most people contribute. I don’t have any income from my own projects.

I am also retired/unemployed on a relatively restricted budget, though TBF my spouse continues to work for now. Even when I was working, I worked at Microsoft/Google but my highest level was a Google L4 (L5 is ‘Senior’), which I only got to a few months before I fully stopped working.

So what I’m saying is if you are here reading this, and you work at a Big Tech company, or any Tech company paying a ridiculous salary, you have no fucking excuse to not help pay for the things that improve your career.

And if OpenAI can give every one of their employees a $1,000,000 bonus, I think they can afford to fund their entire dependency stacks.