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AI’s Unpaid Debt: How LLM Scrapers Destroy the Social Contract of Open Source (www.quippd.com)
submitted 6 days ago by yoasif@fedia.io to c/programming@programming.dev
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TL;DR: The big tech AI company LLMs have gobbled up all of our data, but the damage they have done to open source and free culture communities are particularly insidious. By taking advantage of those who share freely, they destroy the bargain that made free software spread like wildfire.

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[-] VoterFrog@lemmy.world 2 points 5 days ago

I can read your code, learn from it, and create my own code with the knowledge gained from your code without violating an OSS license. So can an LLM.

Not even just an OSS license. No license backed by law is any stronger than copyright. And you are allowed to learn from or statistically analyze even fully copyrighted work.

Copyright is just a lot more permissive than I think many people realize. And there's a lot of good that comes from that. It's enabled things like API emulation and reverse engineering and being able to leave our programming job to go work somewhere else without getting sued.

this post was submitted on 19 Dec 2025
133 points (99.3% liked)

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