Just because AI was involved doesn’t mean significant human thought and effort didn’t go into the production of those artifacts.
My agentic software development loop requires heavy involvement of real-world feedback. The ratio is huge. 20 mins of agentic software coding against hours or days of testing, trying it out, real-world contact, thinking about what feature is next or what tweak would make it more usable, smooth, intuitive. That feedback is baked into the product. Forcing it to be open source steals all that time and effort for me, and takes from
me the decision as to how and whether to open-source it. So you mean the code that I’ve agentically written to help manage my private financial affairs (on local models, for privacy) or my kids’ complicated school schedules must now be open sourced?
Furthermore, copyright protects only the expression, not the idea - reimplementing the same idea with "different words" has always been permitted under copyright law (patents may protect the idea, though).
Of course, the fact that it would lack copyright protection it doesn't implythat you have to do something with the code for management of your kid's schedules, just that if someone else somehow legally gets hold of it, the law won't prevent them from making and distributing copies or derived work.
[−]ginsider_oaks · 2026-11-15 Sun 16:26 UTC ·
link
> Forcing it to be open source steals all that time and effort for me
You are the one "stealing" the time and effort of thousands of people who have written free and open source software. If the ratio really is so huge, then just cut out the small part that does all of the stealing.
> So you mean the code that I’ve agentically written to help manage my private financial affairs (on local models, for privacy) or my kids’ complicated school schedules must now be open sourced?
Open source licensing is only relevant when distributing the software, if you just use it privately it has no effect. You are not forced to make it public.
> My agentic software development loop requires heavy involvement of real-world feedback. The ratio is huge. 20 mins of agentic software coding against hours or days of testing, trying it out, real-world contact, thinking about what feature is next or what tweak would make it more usable, smooth, intuitive. That feedback is baked into the product. Forcing it to be open source steals all that time and effort for me, and takes from me the decision as to how and whether to open-source it.
It doesn't need to be open-sourced: if it's legal to take an LLM that was trained on every other product in existence and use that LLM to produce clones of all those products, then it's legal to do the same to your product to.
So, go ahead and release. There'll be an open-source clone in no time if the product is any good at all.
In fact, if there are no clones, take that as direct feedback that you wasted your money on tokens - your product is so bad no one even wants it for the few dollars it will take to clone it.
Just because AI was involved doesn’t mean significant human thought and effort didn’t go into the production of those artifacts.
My agentic software development loop requires heavy involvement of real-world feedback. The ratio is huge. 20 mins of agentic software coding against hours or days of testing, trying it out, real-world contact, thinking about what feature is next or what tweak would make it more usable, smooth, intuitive. That feedback is baked into the product. Forcing it to be open source steals all that time and effort for me, and takes from me the decision as to how and whether to open-source it. So you mean the code that I’ve agentically written to help manage my private financial affairs (on local models, for privacy) or my kids’ complicated school schedules must now be open sourced?
My manners begin to fail, so I’ll stop here.
Doesn't mean it did either. (99% of the time it didn't tho. Nobody reaches to a vibe code machine because they care or want to dedicate effort.)
Furthermore, copyright protects only the expression, not the idea - reimplementing the same idea with "different words" has always been permitted under copyright law (patents may protect the idea, though).
Of course, the fact that it would lack copyright protection it doesn't implythat you have to do something with the code for management of your kid's schedules, just that if someone else somehow legally gets hold of it, the law won't prevent them from making and distributing copies or derived work.
You are the one "stealing" the time and effort of thousands of people who have written free and open source software. If the ratio really is so huge, then just cut out the small part that does all of the stealing.
> So you mean the code that I’ve agentically written to help manage my private financial affairs (on local models, for privacy) or my kids’ complicated school schedules must now be open sourced?
Open source licensing is only relevant when distributing the software, if you just use it privately it has no effect. You are not forced to make it public.
It doesn't need to be open-sourced: if it's legal to take an LLM that was trained on every other product in existence and use that LLM to produce clones of all those products, then it's legal to do the same to your product to.
So, go ahead and release. There'll be an open-source clone in no time if the product is any good at all.
In fact, if there are no clones, take that as direct feedback that you wasted your money on tokens - your product is so bad no one even wants it for the few dollars it will take to clone it.