I don't understand what the "hacker ethos" could have to do with defending openai's blatant stealing of people's content for their own profit.

Openai is not sharing their data(they're keeping it private to profit off of), so how could it be anywhere near the "hacker ethos" to believe that everyone else needs to hand over their data to openai for free?

Following the "GNU-flavour hacker ethos" as described, one concludes that it is right for OpenAI to copy data without restriction, it is wrong for NYT to restrict others from using their data, and it is also wrong for OpenAI to restrict the sharing of their model weights or outputs for training.

Luckily, most people seem to ignore OpenAI's hypocritical TOS against sharing their output weights for training. I would go one step further and say that they should share the weights completely, but I understand there's practical issues with that.

Luckily, we can kind of "exfiltrate" the weights by training on their output. Or wait for someone to leak it, like NovelAI did.