This article is mostly ragebait, and it's claim is hollow when looked thru the lens of computing history.
Let us skip the whole Bell Labs C/C++/unix/sh/ksh -> BSD csh/vi/bsd/tcp/ip, and other proprietary unix variants/utils and focus instead on today's landscape.
There are two axes we can partition the whole ecosystem. Free/OpenBSD, Clang/LLVM, musl, busybox, X11/Xlib, sqlite, postgresql, nginx, Python, Go, Rust, many embedded rtos, vendor sdk, utilities etc.. and then there is Linux/GCC/glibc, etc. Along the licensing spectrum there is GPL and then the rest of the permissive licenses MIT/BSD/Apache etc where source code publishing is not a requirement.
These permissive license offerings are more prevalent compared to the GPL offerings and as such one can gain all the knowledge needed to build a fully functional system. LLM could memorize, or copy the pattern, so even though it is not a clean room, courts seem to be ok as long as things are not spit out verbatim.
Add to this, the fact the there are tons of research articles, user manuals, RFCs, so one can learn and understand how to build the needed reusable component if small and give their own prompt (and bugs) and and let LLM do as user described.
In the US, purely AI-generated code isn’t copyrightable, but it also doesn’t mean you have to publish it. Also, putting an open-source license on code nobody holds a copyright to has no legal effect. So, ethically or otherwise, there is no strong and convincing argument that open sourcing is the right thing to do.
What 'creators' could do is to compile a list of all the frequently used permissive licenses that are applicable to their system and just make it part of their software license attribution.
Let us skip the whole Bell Labs C/C++/unix/sh/ksh -> BSD csh/vi/bsd/tcp/ip, and other proprietary unix variants/utils and focus instead on today's landscape.
There are two axes we can partition the whole ecosystem. Free/OpenBSD, Clang/LLVM, musl, busybox, X11/Xlib, sqlite, postgresql, nginx, Python, Go, Rust, many embedded rtos, vendor sdk, utilities etc.. and then there is Linux/GCC/glibc, etc. Along the licensing spectrum there is GPL and then the rest of the permissive licenses MIT/BSD/Apache etc where source code publishing is not a requirement.
These permissive license offerings are more prevalent compared to the GPL offerings and as such one can gain all the knowledge needed to build a fully functional system. LLM could memorize, or copy the pattern, so even though it is not a clean room, courts seem to be ok as long as things are not spit out verbatim.
Add to this, the fact the there are tons of research articles, user manuals, RFCs, so one can learn and understand how to build the needed reusable component if small and give their own prompt (and bugs) and and let LLM do as user described.
In the US, purely AI-generated code isn’t copyrightable, but it also doesn’t mean you have to publish it. Also, putting an open-source license on code nobody holds a copyright to has no legal effect. So, ethically or otherwise, there is no strong and convincing argument that open sourcing is the right thing to do.
What 'creators' could do is to compile a list of all the frequently used permissive licenses that are applicable to their system and just make it part of their software license attribution.
[1] https://redmonk.com/sogrady/2026/03/25/open-source-licensing...
[2] https://arxiv.org/pdf/2211.15533