Ask HN: Are you hesitant to open source your project because LLMs may steal it?

The point of releasing my source code is that I want other people to use it, and I don't really care whether they do that directly or indirectly.

What's going to happen? Maybe it will help make the LLM better at code gen, and help everyone. I've written hundreds of thousands of lines of code that have disappeared into the void of history. It would have been nice if all that hadn't been lost.

Well it would have to recreate the entire projects, no? Then they get to maintain it. That seems like a high bar.

And if it’s open source under Apache/MIT license I could care less about people getting snippets from my code.

It is a narrative mostly driven by artists. Your value is mostly in the knowledge and experience you gained.

In case of artists, them being able to make a living was an aberration to the historical pattern, specifically predicated on creation being hard and reproduction being easy. Before 20th century or so it used to be hard/hard, now with GenAI we're at easy/easy and neither can sustain them. Add to that their idealism and that is where it comes from. The "you can become anyone you want" and "follow your dreams" we all were told did not help either.

I'm hesitant because my SAAS might become profitable. Lol.

But then it fails and I make it open source to add to my portfolio.

I don't personally feel like code has any inherent value. You can't "steal" my code unless you repeat it verbatim under a new license, which is illegal with or without AI. I've known the stakes since before AI existed, and the prominence of LLMs doesn't scare me away from open source.

It's up to you. Stallman argued that the greatest value code has is it's utility to others. The "holy grail endgame" of open source is zero-margin software production that completely displaces the need to generate value with software. If AI pushes us closer to that world, then I can sleep well feeding it code.