When AI Creates A Closed Source World

This hit me hard. I contributed thousands of hours of labor into this library and for what? To be kicked out after somebody else starts charging admission for it? Jobs are extremely difficult to come by now?

What is "The Library"?

The aggregate collection of text contributed by any given single individual is known as The Library. This Library that became AI through a large language model was a gathering of each The Library from the collective mind — mine included — yours included perhaps — ingested into their algorithms for predictive text generation.

Many times I would find myself reading StackOverflow™ in a bind between wanting to figure out my thing and correct the record when a post didn't quite get what I needed correct. That back and forth, contributed by me — and by you perhaps — was The Library that these AI companies possessed (nicest way to describe legal theft) and then turned into a subscription. A subscription based on usage now, not even time. How much do you need The Library and how much are you willing to pay? That's what Dario is looking for. That's what Sam is looking for.

My figtree package is in The Library in a way that is both seen and unseen. I didn't consent to that work being uploaded, so why do I pay a subscription to access The Library that contains my works and their predictive derivatives? Those predictive derivatives are where the intellectual property is captured beyond the raw code itself — the between the lines meaning from project A to project B, what a competitor or bad actor could make against my own efforts.

The Problem With Open Source

I have contributed 99+ open source packages on GitHub. I'm a 5-digit user ID from 2009. And I see a problem with open source in 2026.

Look at what happened in June. Anthropic launched Fable 5, and within three days the US government invoked national security export controls and forced it offline worldwide. Think about what that means: models trained on our freely-given contributions are now considered so dangerous they get handled like weapons. Knowledge went in open and unconsented. It came out closed, priced, and government-controlled.

So why would I release anything open source anymore? Sam, Dario and Elon — along with thousands of others — will just take the work, incorporate it into the LLM itself, and use my own knowledge against me. I would be foolish to think open source could survive this. Any engineer who runs the numbers arrives at the same place: closed source is the future. Private repos. Stop training your replacement for free.

I ran those numbers too. I arrived at the same place.

Romania

And then I remembered that I have already lived in a closed-source world.

I've been involved in the internet since the day I arrived in the United States from Romania — the era when the University of Maine ran BITNET, before the good people of Maine had access to TCP/IP. My programming career began at 9 years old because of the University. By 11 I had the internet. In 1994 I was doing computer work beside my mother in Neville Hall in Orono — the same building that ran the state of Maine's connection. Nobody charged us admission. Thousands contributed willingly because the incentive was to learn and better yourself, and an orphan from Ceaușescu's Romania became an engineer at Cisco, Oracle, and WB Games because that door was open.

The Internet is going through a revolution like Romania did after Ceaușescu's Christmas Present 1989, and AI caused it. But I know what grows behind closed doors. I grew up in it.

So No

Everything above this line says I should close my source. I'm not going to, and you should know it's not because the theft isn't real — it is, and I want it remedied: disclosure of training data, consent for future ingestion, compensation for what was taken.

But somewhere there is another 11-year-old at a public terminal, and my code costs them nothing.

Don't close-source your contributions for anyone's bottom line. Be like me — Andrei — and continue giving selflessly, expecting nothing in return, more useful open source utilities that the greater good actually needs.

Why do you still publish open source — or why did you stop? I'll respond to every comment.