I think there is a real issue here, but I do not think it is as simple as calling it theft in the same way as copying books. The bigger problem is incentives. We built a system where writing docs, tutorials, and open technical content paid off indirectly through traffic, subscriptions, or services. LLMs get a lot of value from that work, but they also break the loop that used to send value back to the people and companies who created it.

The Tailwind CSS situation is a good example. They built something genuinely useful, adoption exploded, and in the past that would have meant more traffic, more visibility, and more revenue. Now the usage still explodes, but the traffic disappears because people get answers directly from LLMs. The value is clearly there, but the money never reaches the source. That is less a moral problem and more an economic one.

Ideas like GPL-style licensing point at the right tension, but they are hard to apply after the fact. These models were built during a massive spending phase, financed by huge amounts of capital and debt, and they are not even profitable yet. Figuring out royalties on top of that, while the infrastructure is already in place and rolling out at scale, is extremely hard.

That is why this feels like a much bigger governance problem. We have a system that clearly creates value, but no longer distributes it in a sustainable way. I am not sure our policies or institutions are ready to catch up to that reality yet.

I support your right to have an opinion, but in my opinion, thank God this is just your opinion.

Copyright, as practiced in late 20 and this century, is a tool for big corps to extract profits from actual artists, creators, and consumers of this art[0] equally. Starving artists do not actually benefit.

Look at Spotify (owned and squeezed by record labels) giving 70% of the revenue to the record labels, while artists get peanuts. Look at Disney deciding it doesn't need to pay royalties to book writers. Hell, look at Disney's hits from Snow White onwards, and then apply your "LLMs are IP theft" logic to that.

Here's what Cory Doctorow, a book author and critic of AI, has to say about it in [1]:

> So what is the alternative? A lot of artists and their allies think they have an answer: they say we should extend copyright to cover the activities associated with training a model.

> And I'm here to tell you they are wrong: wrong because this would inflict terrible collateral damage on socially beneficial activities, and it would represent a massive expansion of copyright over activities that are currently permitted – for good reason!.

---

> All written text, art work, etc needs to come imbued with a GPL style license

GPL-style license has been long known not to work well for artifacts other than code. That's the whole reason for existence of Creative Commons, GNU Free Documentation License, and others.

[0] "consumers of art" sounds abhorrent, yet that's exactly what we are [1] https://pluralistic.net/2025/12/05/pop-that-bubble/

I stopped writing open source projects on github because why put a bunch of work into something for others to train off of without any regard for the original projects

> if you train your model on this, your weights and training code must be published.

The problem here is enforcement.

It's well known that AI companies simply pirated content in order to train their models. No amount of license really helps in that scenario.

> imbued with a GPL style license

GPL died. Licenses died.

Exnation: LLMs were trained also on GPL code. The fact that all the previously-paranoid businesses that used to warn SWEs not to touch GPL code with a ten foot pole are now fearlessly embracing LLMs' outputs, means that de facto they consider an LLM their license-washing machine. Courts are going to rubber stamp it because billions of dollars, etc.

Do I have to publish my book for free because I got inspiration from 100's of other books I read during my life?

We already have more IP than any human could ever consume. Why do we need to incentivize anything? Those who are motivated by the creation itself will continue to create. Those who are motivated by the possibility of extracting rent may create less. Not sure that's a bad thing for humanity as a whole.

> if you train your model on this, your weights and training code must be published.

This feels like the simplest & best single regulation that can be applied in this industry.

This is one way to look at it.

The other way is to argue that LLMs democratize access to knowledge. Anyone has access to all ever written by humanity.

Crazy impressive if you ask me.

I both agree and disagree with you.

The thing is, copyright law is not really on your side. Viewing copyrighted material without paying for it is not generally something people get fined for. A lot of training falls under fair use that overrides whatever license you come up with. Disney can’t stop me from uploading clips of their movies alongside commentary and review because fair use allows that. LLMs generally aren’t redistributing code, which is the thing that copyright protects.

If I inspect some GPL code and get inspired by it and write something similar, the GPL license doesn’t apply to me.

It has always been the case that if you don’t want other people to apply fair use to your works, your only recourse is to keep those works private. I suspect that now individuals and companies that don’t want their code to be trained on will simply keep the code private.

Now, there have been times where LLMs have reproduced verbatim copyright material. The NYTimes sued OpenAI over this issue. I believe they’ve settled and come up with a licensing scheme unless I’m mixing up my news stories.

Second thing, your issue becomes moot if there exists a model that only trains off of MIT-licensed code, and there is a TON of that code out there.

Third thing, your issue becomes moot if users have agreed to submit their code for training, like what the GitHub ToS does for users who don’t change their settings, or if giant companies with giant code bases just use their own code to train LLMs.

Where I agree with you is that perhaps copyright law should evolve. Still, I think there’s a practical “cat is out of the bag” issue.

>This substantially reduces the incentive for the creation of new IP.

Not all, but some kind of IP.

Some of those that is created for sake of creating it and nothing else.

But it’s not theft, because you’re not redistributing. It’s allowed, just like humans are allowed to learn from copyrighted content.

Commercialization may be a net good for open source, in that it helps sustain the project’s investment, but I don’t think that means that you’re somehow entitled to a commercial business just because you contributed something to the community.

The moment Tailwind becomes a for-profit, commercial business, they have to duke it out just like anyone else. If the thing you sell is not defensible, it means you have a brittle business model. If I’m allowed to take Tailwind, the open source project, and build something commercial around it, I don’t see why OpenAI or Anthropic cannot.

Education can be viewed as intellectual property theft. There have been periods in history when it was. "How to take an elevation from a plan" was a trade secret of medieval builders and only revealed to guild members. How a power loom works was export-controlled information in the 1800s, and people who knew how a loom works were not allowed to emigrate from England.

The problem is that LLMs are better than people at this stuff. They can read a huge quantity of publicly available information and organize it into a form where the LLM can do things with it. That's what education does, more slowly and at greater expense.

By your analogy human brains as also IP thefts, because they ingest what's available in the world, mix and match them, and synthesize slightly different IPs based on them.

Intellectual property was kind of a gimmick to begin with, though. Let's not pretend like copyright and patents made any sense to begin with

Is there such a license? Or any license with special clauses for LLMs? Is it enforcable? Could someone 'poison' an LLM training run with injecting just one such licensed document? I am genuinely curious about what levers exist (or are conceivable) to protect your own IP from becoming LLM training data, if regular copyright does not qualify.

If I was able to memorize every pixel value to reconstruct a movie from memory, would that be theft?

It's already imbued with copyright infringement if you copy it without a license.

> This substantially reduces the incentive for the creation of new IP

And as a result of this, the models will start consuming their own output for training. This will create new incentives to promote human generated code.

In my opinion information wants to be free. It's wild to me seeing the tech world veer into hyper-capitalism and IP protectionism. Complete 180 from the 00s.

IMO copyright laws should be rewritten to bring copyright inline with the rest of the economy.

Plumbers are not claiming use fees from the pipes they installed a decade ago. Doctor isn't getting paid by a 70 year old for saving the 70 year old when they were in a car accident at age 50.

Why should intellectual property authors be given extreme ownership over behavior then?

In the Constitution Congress is allowed to protect with copyright "for a limited time".

The status quo of life of author + 99 years means works can be copyrighted for many peoples entire lives. In effect unlimited protection.

Why is society on the hook to preserve a political norm that materially benefits so few?

Because the screen tells us the end is nigh! and giant foot will crush us! if we move on from old America. Sad and pathetic acquiescence to propaganda.

My fellow Americans; must we be such unserious people all the time?

This hypernormalized finance engineered, "I am my job! We make line go up here!" culture is a joke.

> This substantially reduces the incentive for the creation of new IP.

You say that like it's a bad thing...

Does anyone know of active work happening on such a license?

The idea of being able to “steal” ideas is absolutely silly.

Yeah we’ve got a legal system for it, but it always has been and always will be silly.

In my opinion, IP is dead. Strong IP died in 2022, along with the Marxist labor theory of value; of which IP derives its (hypothetical) value. It no longer matters who did what when and how. The only thing that matters is that exists, and it can be consumed, for no cost, forever.

IP is the final delusion of 19th century thinking. It was crushed when we could synthesize anything, at little cost, little effort. Turns out, the hard work had to be done once, and we could automate to infinity forever.

Hold on to 19th century delusions if you wish, the future is accelerating, and you are going to be left behind.

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> If suddenly CSS became pleasant to use, Tailwind would be in a rough spot.

CSS is pleasant to use. I know I find it pleasant to use; and I know there are quite a few frontend developers who do too. I didn't pay much attention to tailwind, until suddenly I realized that it has spread like wildfire and now is everywhere. What drove that growth? Which groups were the first adopters of tailwind; how did they grow; when did the growth skyrocket? Why did it not stay as niche as, say, htmx?

That’s not at all why I bought Tailwind Plus. I bought it (at work) to have a solid collection of typical components and UI patterns, mostly expertly designed with a lot of attention to detail, to use as inspiration and as a shared language with other frontend devs and designers. I rarely (if ever) actually copy pasted any of their HTML or Tailwind styles. It’s mostly used as reference and inspiration. The fact that it’s implemented in Tailwind is mostly irrelevant (Tailwind really isn’t hard to use, especially after your first couple of small projects).

> If suddenly CSS became pleasant to use

Not being sarcastic, but this will never be. CSS is a perfectly functional interface, but the only way it becomes less annoying is when you abstract it behind something more user friendly like tailwind or AI (or you spend years building up knowledge and intuition for its quirks and foibles).

We have decades of data at this point that fairly conclusively shows that many people find CSS as an interface inherently confusing.

> Making GitHub actions runners more reliable, stable and economical would hurt Microsoft.

Can you explain this one a bit? I know some folks who would absolutely increase their spend if Actions runners were better. As it stands I've seen folks trying to move off of them.

CSS has come a long way. I used to include Bootstrap in all of my projects, effectively by default. Now it's obsolete. Especially with Grid and Flex.

Do people even know what they can do with CSS these days?

https://lyra.horse/blog/2025/08/you-dont-need-js/

I know I’m echoing others’ responses but CSS in 2026 is incredible, easy to use and beautiful.

I find the tailwindcss approach inexcusable and unmaintainable.

You can’t even have dynamic Classes: https://tailwindcss.com/docs/detecting-classes-in-source-fil...

> <div class="text-{{ error ? 'red' : 'green' }}-600"></div>

—- I find it really crazy that they think would be good idea. I wonder how many false positive css stuff is being added given their “trying to match classes”. So if you use random strings like bg-… will add some css. I think it’s ridiculous, but tells that people that use this can’t be very serious about it and won’t work in large projects.

—— > Using multi-cursor editing When duplication is localized to a group of elements in a single file, the easiest way to deal with it is to use multi-cursor editing to quickly select and edit the class list for each element at once

Instead of using a var and reusing, you just use multi cursors. Bad suggestions again.

—-

> If you need to reuse some styles across multiple files, the best strategy is to create a component

But on benefits says

> Your code is more portable — since both the structure and styling live in the same place, you can easily copy and paste entire chunks of UI around, even between different projects.

—-

> Making changes feels safer — adding or removing a utility class to an element only ever affects that element, so you never have to worry about accidentally breaking something another page that's using the same CSS.

CSS in js fixed this long time ago.

—-

<div class="mx-auto flex max-w-sm items-center gap-x-4 rounded-xl bg-white p-6 shadow-lg outline outline-black/5 dark:bg-slate-800 dark:shadow-none dark:-outline-offset-1 dark:outline-white/10"> <img class="size-12 shrink-0" src="/img/logo.svg" alt="ChitChat Logo" /> <div> <div class="text-xl font-medium text-black dark:text-white">ChitChat</div> <p class="text-gray-500 dark:text-gray-400">You have a new message!</p> </div> </div>

So many classes you need to learn to use it.

> killed Tailwind Labs

They are still around.

> "Give everything away for free and this people will leave technology"

This is more interesting, although somewhat generally understood (can be conflated with people seeing "free" and "cheap" and therefore undesirable). It depends on your definitely of longevity but we certainly have a LOT of free software that has, so far, lasted the test of time.

Your synthesis points to software in the public interest. Governments need to start forking projects and guiding them through maturity, the same as other public utilities.

How is this drastically different than a lot of software companies that open source software and then sell support service for monetization?

> Tailwind Labs relied on a weird monetization scheme. Revenue was proportional to the pain of using the framework.

Really? To me, Tailwind seemed like the pinnacle of how anyone here would say “open source software” should function. Provide a solid, truly open source, software and make money from consulting or helping others use it and selling custom built solutions around it. The main sin of Tailwind was assuming that type of business could scale to a “large business” structure as opposed to “a single dev”-type project. By a “single dev”-type I don’t mean literally one guy, but more a very lean and non-corporate or company-like structure.

Vercel (and redislabs, mongo, etc) are different because they are in the “we can run it for you” business. Which is another “open source” model I have dabbled in for a while in my career. Thinking that the honest and ethical position is to provide open source software, then offer to host it for people who don’t want to selfhost and charge for that.

GPT is the middleman.

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I think you live in a conspiracy world.

> Improving accessibility to compute power would hurt Amazon, Microsoft and Google.

Yeah, if they were not competing against each other.

> If suddenly CSS became pleasant to use, Tailwind would be in a rough spot. See the irony?

Honestly, I don't. If people suddenly adopted a heathier lifestyle, doctors, at least dentists, would be in a rough spot.

See the irony? Well, again I don't.

The pain and opportunity will move elsewhere.

Tailwind is a handy tool that deserves support and sustainability

In software (and business in general!), innovation is expected. If you built a building in San Francisco that couldn't handle a relatively minor earthquake you could argue it would be a 'stress test'.

It's like the author doesn't understand what failing a stress test does.

It's a reddit alternative hosted by a venture capitalist firm, the startup culture is much more prevalent here than the hacker culture that inspires the website's <title> tag.

also death penalty for touching oil rigs, via Bush I.. "stay in your lane" plus license plate readers

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But why would you click the tailwinds link if you're getting correct answers? You don't need documentation or consulting.

Google and Facebook couldn't provide full news articles because of copyright law. They just showed headline and summary provided by the news websites (and still eventually got sued for showing the summaries).

I feel that the battle is already lost when we aren't arguing that the AI service must get a license from the copyright holder like everybody else, but instead just arguing how many crumbs is the AI service morally obliged to throw back.

The number one rule of these apps is don’t link outside the app (because then the user will stop their session).

I was thinking something similar, but not so much an ad as a citation. A good starting point might be a law stating that when an LLM produces an answer, it cite its sources, with a link back to the content. Ideally, though, the producer of that content should receive some amount of financial compensation as well, similar to how an author or an actor receives royalties. If the LLM is making money off of this, so should the person who provide the LLM the value.

> we do probably need some kind of industry organization to maintain these things.

In the case of CSS, we already have that:

https://www.w3.org/Style/CSS/Overview.en.html

The author meant that you can't just tell a model "do everything that is necessary to achieve 99.95% uptime". It can certainly help you brainstorm issues and solve them, but you can't "just" prompt it.

i think whole business around software is to change (as i said in another thread few days ago).

if u imagine the "business" stack as: customers on top, over business, over analysis, over software, over machines/infrastructure.. 25+ years ago i thought that DSLs and such very-high-level-mostly-formalised-descriptions will move the line between what-product-is-aka-business-analysis and software/coding towards software, reducing its part in the whole stack.

Well, it did not happen, just the opposite - instead the developers become expected to know everything from infrastructure to software to analysis to business domain and higher. So, stack became something like customers over business over... software-dev. Requirements, analysis... mostly gone / done by devs.

Now if that whole "software-dev" part collapses into zero-margin, i see two ways: either businesses very quickly resurrect the business-analysis (what the product is) and make that their margin/moat, or the customers start making their own software (as throwaway 100 wrongs is now possible) - and removing the business from the whole transaction...

It isn't that simple. One of the implicit tradeoffs you make buying SaaS is that the overall cost of evolution (development and ongoing maintenance) is subsidized across all of the investment resources and customer base of the vendor. With CRM in particular, ecosystem integration is one of the heaviest buildouts there is because each point solution integration can very significantly in complexity and is also where the combinatoric explosion of misbehavior sets in.

When you decide to pull that in house, you are implicitly burdening yourself with the cost of the buildout as well as ongoing maintenance. True, you could probably knock together an okay v1 of CRM yourself inhouse. But are you really going to get it to and maintain production level quality over time at a lower total cost of ownership? I'm skeptical.

The theoretical party you are describing would probably be better served by simply avoiding Salesforce in favor of a next gen CRM that is both more cost effective and easier to customize. In enterprise contexts, even HubSpot is effectively next gen, but there are also products like Attio et al that have a ton of adoption and strong integration ecosystems (albeit not at the Salesforce level).

When you buy enterprise software from a vendor you are buying more than "just software" you are also hiring a company's services. And the inverse is correct as well, when you choose to build it in house, you are implicitly choosing to hire a team internally to resource all of the services you would've expected that vendor to provide.

Certainly, this tradeoff can still make a lot of sense for some companies. The acid test for that, in my opinion, is whether said company could (and would) actually successfully sell the product they build internally on the open market. If the answer to that is "yes", the prospect of turning a cost center into a profit center can potentially bear significant long term ROI to the company.

>> Our sales people can make feature requests

I can tell you with near-100% certainty. This isn’t what you want to happen. Disaster in the making.

Just because you can doesn’t mean you should. There is very little competitive advantage to be gained from this type of effort in most companies.

Yep agreed, totally changes build vs buy decisions. Which is not to say it's always "build" now, but the calculation has changed.

The flurry machine isn't permanently broken, it's just keeping someone employed.

Unless you replace the entire workforce, you'd be surprised how much organizational work and soft skills are involved in an infrastructure at scale.

Like sure, there is a bunch of stuff like monitoring, alerting that is telling us that a database is filling up it's disk. This is already automated. It could also have automated remediation with tech from the 2000s with some simple rule-based systems (so you can understand why those misbehaved, instead of entirely opaque systems that just do whatever).

The thing is though, very often the problem isn't the disk filling up or fixing that.

The problem is rather figuring out what silly misbehavior the devs introduced, if a PM had a strange idea they did not validate, if this is backed by a business case and warrants more storage, if your upstream software has a bug, or whatever else. And then more stuff happens and you need to open support cases with your cloud provider because they just broke their API to resize disks, ...

And don't even get me started on trying to organize access management with a minimally organized project consulting team. Some ADFS config resulting from that is the trivial part.

If "99.95% uptime on Black Friday", and "keeping a site secure, updated, and running" can ever be automated (by which I mean not a toy site and not relying on sheer luck), not only 99.99% of people in IT are out of a job, but humans as intelligent beings are done. This is such a doomsday scenario that there's not even a point in discussing it.

How? I am tired of these unfounded claims. Humans can’t even keep many sites secure.

Care to provide a prompt that leads to coding agent achieving 99.95% uptime on Black Friday as an example?

Drop the "test". Just "stress" – it's cleaner.

  > if you are growing and you found AI efficiency then that's great (e.g. FB) but if you're not growing and only thing AI could do for you is "efficiency" then there is a fundamental problem no AI can fix.

And someday we will have truly autonomous driving cars, we will cure cancer, and humans will visit Mars.

You can't prompt this today, are you suggesting this might come literally tomorrow? 10 years? 30? At that unknown time will your comment become relevant?

I'm working on a project now and what you're saying is already true. I have agents that are able to handle other things apart from code.

But these are MY agents. They are given access to MY domain knowledge in the way that I configured. They have rules as defined by ME over the course of multi-week research and decision making. And the interaction between my agents is also defined and enforced by me.

Can someone come up with a god-agent that will do all of this? Probably. Is it going to work in practice? Highly unlikely.

So you think a statement about the current state of things is wrong because you believe that sometime in the future agents are going to magically do everything? Great argument!

To be able to do this requires perfect domain knowledge AND environment knowledge AND be able to think deeply about logical dominoes (event propagation through the system, you know, the small stuff that crashes cloudflare for the entire planet for example).

Please wake me up when Shopify lets a bunch of agentic LLMs run their backends without human control and constant supervision.

Yep - exactly. Ops isn't immune to LLMs stealing your customers. Given that most of the "open source product with premium hosting" models are just reselling hyperscaler compute at a huge markup, the customers are going to realize pretty quickly that they can use an LLM to setup some basic devops and get the same uptime. Most of these companies are offering a middleman service that becomes a bad deal the moment the customer has access to expertise they previously lacked.

I also think he's glossing over the fact that one of the reasons why companies choose to pay for "ops" to run their software for them is because it's built by amateurs or amateurs-playing-professional and runs like shit. I happen to know this first hand from years of working at a company selling hosting and ops for the exact same CMS that Dries' business hosts (Drupal, a PHP-based CMS) and the absolute garbage that some people are able to put together in frameworks like Wordpress and Drupal is truly astounding. I'm not even talking about the janky local businesses where their nephew who was handy with computers made them a Wordpress site - big multinational companies have sites in these frameworks that can barely handle 1x their normal traffic and more or less explode at 1.5x.

The business of hosting these customers' poorly optimized garbage remains a big business. But we're entering into an era where the people who produce poorly optimized software have a different path to take rather than throwing it to a SaaS platform that can through sheer force of will make their lead-weight airplane fly. They can spend orders of magnitude less money to pay an LLM to make the software actually just not run like shit in the first place. Throwing scaling at the problem of 99.95% is a blunt instrument that only works if the person paying doesn't have the time, money, or knowledge to do it themselves.

Companies like these (including the one I work for currently) are absolutely going to get squeezed from both directions. The ceiling is coming down as more realize they can do their own devops, and the floor is rising as customer code quality gets better. Eventually you have to try your best to be 3 ft tall instead of 6.

> the tokenizer isn't immune to this

A tokenizer's set of tokens isn't copyrightable in the first place, so it can't really be a derivative work of anything.

When you say “in” them, are you referring to their training data, or their model weights, or the infrastructure required to run them?

> then pick the right license for your business

That's one of the issues with AI, though; strongly copylefted software suddenly finds itself unable to enforce its license because "AI" gets a free pass on copyright for some reason.

Dual-licensing open source with business-unfriendly licensing used to be a pretty good way to sell software, but thanks to the absurd legal position AI models have managed to squeeze themselves into, that stopped in an instant.