We're about to waltz into a deep period of tension between developers, and people who, empowered by multimillion dollars corporations, bravely violate developers' copyrights in the hopes of replacing their jobs, while bullying these same developers who dare express their discontent.
This is not gonna end well.
Whether tldraw's issue was a joke or not, it highlights a real tension: open source maintainers are watching AI companies train on their code, tests, and documentation - the very artifacts that make software reliable - and then use it to generate competing implementations. Tests are arguably more valuable than the code itself because they encode the specification and edge cases.
I suspect we'll see more projects adopt a split model: open source the runtime, keep the validation suite proprietary. It's a natural response when your test suite becomes a training signal for competitors.
"Sorry folks, this issue was more of a joke (am I allowed to do that?) but I'll keep the issue open since there's some discussion here."
Well that's embarrassing! I reported it as if it wasn't a joke. I thought the joke issue was this one about translating everything to Chinese: https://github.com/tldraw/tldraw/issues/8092
If you know that context and the tweet I feel this is more obvious that it is a joke.
Just because you didn't get the joke, does not make it a really shit joke. The funniest jokes rely on context.
In addition to his great sense of humor, Steve is usually ahead of the curve in terms of trends. There's a lesson in this. LLMs have become incredible constraint solvers ("SAT-solvers for code"). Well-thought-out tests, types, specs, and docs are all incredibly valuable constraints. This has big implications - for example what happens to licenses when you can cheaply rewrite the codebase and therefore unencumber it.
The performative closing of public contributions citing the slop scare felt disingenuous from the start. You couldn't be bothered to implement _any_ mitigations that leave the community engaged with the project?
Writing a contributor karma bot, moving to a non-social or obscure git forge (most slop contributors are resume farming and GitHub is the only forge the HR cares about), newbie-unfriendly non-public workflows like git send-mail, or references from Discord... This isn't an AGI on the other side of the screen, planning the perfect strategy to infiltrate your project; it's a sub-script-kiddie trying to fill a portfolio with quick "contributions" doing the more annoying version of "fixing typos" in docs.
I have a personal theory that "tragedy of the commons" has a very specific meaning, and beyond this meaning it just adds confusion. This isn't your fault - it's an overused phrase.
I'd try to examine the root of your discomfort. Why does it make you feel bad? Avoid thinking about "big ideas" like the commons or the public good.
simonw correctly describes it as "not technically open source" - though OSI doesn't have the trademark, the term open source, capitalized or not, refers to the what the Open Source Definition codifies. There are other terms such as shared source, for this sort of stuff.