If you're following the photopea incident, I'm sure you'd concur that the writing was on the wall. It's an inevitable outcome of the rise of AI in software dev. Any project that sees a semblance of success will be cloned overnight many times over and will find itself competing with its own copies.

We saw glimpses of a similar situation in the past when large cloud platforms cloned popular softwares in a not a very dissimilar manner. This led to the creation of "source available" as an alternative to open source that gained some traction of its own. But since this mostly affected a few large players, open source by and itself was large unaffected still supported by large volumes of individuals driven by passion, motivated towards their craft.

The concept of open source is itself something of an anomaly not seen in any other industry or at any other time in history. Partly fueled by an individual's desire to exhibit original work, and partly supported by the fact that code needs someone of an equal to work with, it still allowed authors to reap a net benefit while giving out their IP for free. LLMs have turned that picture over completely. It's not only trivial to derive, for all purposes, an exact copy of the IP while obscuring the source, it's also possible to maintain and operate the IP with a relatively low bar of expertise. But the other inconspicuous problem brought about by LLMs is that can you even claim original work any more? When no one believes that you wrote it yourself, what motivation remains to continue publishing as open source? With no net benefit to revealing your IP, will we see a revival to closed source distribution again?