this post was submitted on 25 Jul 2026
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As a developer, you hold the copyright to your code. When you make it open-source, you grant a license to use the code and the resulting program under certain terms.
This is a contract. If you copy my code without following these terms, then that's theft.
The Internet Archive's use complies with these terms for all open-source licenses. These AI companies do not. In particular, here's a quote from the MIT license, which you will find in a similar wording in all open-source licenses:
https://mit-license.org/
In effect, what this means, is that when you copy my code, I demand that you also copy the license text along with it, so that anyone else looking at this code knows the permissions I grant and the terms I require.
And now guess what these AI companies are doing. They copy my code and reproduce substantial portions upon a user asking, yet they do not include my license terms. They violate the contract under which they obtained my source code.
I suspect you don't realize how shit that is, because source code is so abstract.
It's like spending hundreds of hours painting a great artwork and then deciding that everyone should be able to give a copy to everyone they know, under the simple condition that they inform those people that they have this right as well.
And then comes along a company and sells my artwork for money, without informing their customers that they can pass it on for free. That's, plain and simple, a criminal operation.
No one. What people give a shit about is the license that is supposed to keep the code open, which is being removed for profit without consequence.
In our current legal system, copyright is the basis for me to be able to set requirements on how my code can be shared. I do not care that I own it, I just care that it is shared under the conditions I set.
Without being able set these conditions, I would not open up my code.
If nobody owns the code, then then nobody can enforce the terms of the license it was released under, and free software under the FSF definition becomes impossible. All you have is public domain.
For example, a company could take the Linux kernel, modify it and distribute it with their gadgets. And they could simply not release the modifications they've made, as is required by the GNU Public License. But nobody would be able to do anything about it. Currently, copyright laws allow the people who wrote the Linux kernel to sue the company for breaking the license and violating the authors' copyrights