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> I view this as an unmitigated good.

Then I don't think you've thought it through.

This entire software ecosystem depends on volunteering and cooperation. It demands respect of the people doing the work. Adhering to their licensing terms is the payment they demand for the work they do.

If you steal their social currency, they may just walk away for good, and nobody will pick up the slack for you. And if you're a whole society of greedy little thieves, the future of software will be everyone preciously guarding and hiding their changes to the last open versions of software from some decades ago.

You should read Bruce Perens' testimony in the Jacobsen v. Katzer case that explained all this (and determined that licensing terms are enforceable, and you can't just say "his is open mine is open what's the difference?")

https://web.archive.org/web/20100331083827/http://perens.com...

I mean in the context of AI - we're already seeing the conflagration of SAAS, and software jobs are going kaput. It's my deeply considered opinion that the faster this happens, the better, because it'll force a reckoning with impending AI job loss across the board.

We need to deal with the issues now. The worst possible outcome is a gradual drip-drip-drip of incremental job losses, people shuffling from job to job, taking financial hits, some companies pretending everything is fine, other companies embracing full-bore zero employee work. The longer it goes on, the more wealth and power gets siphoned up by corporations and individuals who already have significant wealth, the bigger the inequality, and the bigger the social turmoil.

Software, graphics design, music, and video (even studio level movies) should cope with this now. It's not going to stop, AI isn't going to get worse, there's not going to be some special human only domain carved out. The sooner we cope with this the better, because it'll set the foundation for the rest of the job loss barreling down on us like the Chicxulub asteroid.

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