Is AI the last stroke that will kill open source and free software maintainers ? It's clear the situation escalated quickly - but I'd argue that it can trigger a new golden age of Free and Open Source Software.

The problem is, AI removes the protections provided by (A)GPL: It learns exclusively from the free software and generates "unlicensed" code. AGPL is loosing its teeth.

Commercial companies will even learn from your new, quickly growing, AI-accelerated codebase to release something better under a closed license. And your free software, although more efficiently growing, will stay even more behind its proprietary alternatives than before.

that's a good point - the reformulation from AI tools is as you say "eroding the teeth" of the GPL based solutions - but the cost to make these solutions is dramatically reduced.

I'd even go further and say that the biggest problem of free software has always been the lack of frontend/designer willing to put in the contributions to make the UX a pleasant experience.

I guess we could argue that with the frontend skills of recent models it's also getting better.

Now the question will be after all that how much we will be willing to pay for a slightly better integrated experience ?

Doesn't that cut both ways though? What prevents me from taking the code from dbt-fusion and AI-laundering it to include all the new features on a FOSS fork?

AFAIK AIs do not learn from the proprietary code.

What would stop them? AFAIK any and all data and content that can be obtained by any means is used in model training.

most models are built on theft anyway, especially if you take the GDPR viewpoint

Except the megacorps won't let you use their closed software for learning. They're fine to use others' copyrighted materials though.

There are plenty of US corporations who don't look further than a SOC2 report.

reverse engineering stays under "fair use" when it's for interoperability purposes

Which is an order of magnitude harder than reading the code.

Of course but the investments needed in obfuscations and the bugs introduced are orders of magnitude more important. It looks a lot like the struggle between ad providers and ad blockers - the ad blockers may be lagging behind but eventually they catch up. Same things with scrapping