I keep seeing this attitude and I don't really understand it at all; there's no upside to publishing open source work because it might be utilized by more people, is that correct?

Or is it the attribution? There are many many libraries I have used and continue to use and I don't know the author's internet handle or Christian name. Does that matter? Why?

I have written a lot of code that my name is no longer attached to. I don't care and I don't know why anyone does. If it were valuable I would have made more money off of it in the first place, and I don't have the ego to just care that people know it's my code either.

I want the things I do today to have an upside for people in the future. If that means I write code that gets incorporated into a model that people use to build things N number of years from now, that's great. That's awesome. Why the hell is that apparently so demotivating to some people?

> I want the things I do today to have an upside for people in the future.

I think most would agree with this, but the way things work today don't support it. As of now, AI gains are privatized while the losses are socialized. Until that one-sided imbalance is addressed, LLM's "use" of open source is unbounded and nonreciprocal.

Attribution is a big part of the human experience. Your response frames it as ego driven, but it's also what motivates people to maintain code that is not usually compensated, it's also what builds reputation, trust, communities, and even careers.

Until that’s figured out, we can still share, but maybe in ways that are closer to one another, or under distribution models that reflect the reality we’re in rather than the one we used to have.

> there's no upside to publishing open source work because it might be utilized by more people, is that correct?

I believe the perspective here is "I make code for fellow hackers to look into, critique, be educated on, or simply play with". If you see the hacker scene as a social one, LLM's are an awful black hole that sucks up everything around it and ruins this collaboration.

Not to mention that the hacker scene was traditionally thought to be a rejection of what we now call "Big Tech". Corporate was free to grab the code, but it didn't matter much as long as the scene was kept. Now even that invisible social contract is broken.

But I suppose if you're of a diehard FOSS mentality, "Free" means "Free". Free to be used to build, or destroy society at its whim. a hivemind to meld into and progress the overall understanding of science, for science's sake.

I'll admit the last few years have had me questioning what I truly want to do within the on these two mentalities.