[sarchertech]

Ignoring the legal or ethical concerns. Let’s say we live in a world where the cost of copying code is so close to zero that it’s indistinguishable from a world without copyright.

Anything you put out can and will be used by whatever giant company wants to use it with no attribution whatsoever.

Doesn’t that massively reduce the incentive to release the source of anything ever?

[satvikpendem]

No, because (most) people don't work on OSS for vanity, they do it to help other people, whether it's individuals or groups of individuals, ie corporations.

It's the same question as, if an AI can generate "art", or photographers can capture a scene better than any (realistic) painter, then will people still create art? Obviously yes, and we see it of course after Stable Diffusion was released three years ago, people are still creating.

[sarchertech]

I don’t know what a world without copyright does to corporate sponsored open source. It certainly reduces it because there are many corporate sponsored projects that monetize through dual licensing. My guess is in a world where you can’t even guarantee attribution, it’s much harder to convince your boss to let you open source a project in the first place.

So ignoring people who are being paid by corporations directly to work on open source, in my experience the vast majority of contributors expect to be able to monetize their work eventually in a way that requires attribution. And out of the small number who don’t expect a monetary return of any kind, a still smaller number don’t expect recognition.

If this weren’t the case you’d see a much larger amount of anonymous contributions. There are people who anonymously donate to charity. The vast majority want some kind of recognition.

Obviously we still see art, if you greatly reduce the monetary benefit to producing art, you’ll see a lot less of it. This is especially true of non trivial open source software that unlike static artwork requires continual maintenance.

[joshjob42]

If the cost to copying code based on specifications, tests, etc is so close to zero as to be functionally zero cost, then any user can simply turn their AI on any library for which there is documentation and any ability to generate tests, have it reverse engineer it, and release their reverse engineered copy on GitHub for others to use as they like.

So I'm not sure it matters whether a giant company uses it because random users can get the same thing for ~ free anyway.

[sarchertech]

You can mostly stop that with enoiugh lawyers and requiring and agreement not to reverse engineer to access documentation or use the software.

[intrasight]

Most commercial software that I've used has the model of a legal moat around a pretty crappy database schema.

The non IP protection has largely been in the effort involved in replicating an application's behavior and that effort is dropping precipitously.

[sarchertech]

You must not have used much commercial software outside of crappy business SaaS.

[intrasight]

Truth

[pocksuppet]

Yes, and it reduces the incentives to release binaries too. Such a world will be populated by almost entirely SaaS, which can still compete on freedom.