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Comment by brookst | Hacker News Reader

Protect you from what?

What harm is there to you if someone uses some of your code to build a business, as compared to not doing so? How are you worse off?

I’ve never understood this mentality. It seems very zero sum and kind of anti social. I’ve built a couple of businesses, and there’s always economic or technical precedent. I honestly don’t mind paying it forward if someone can benefit from side projects I enjoyed doing anyways.

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You have a right to the work you author. If you are selling your work or your services, then you have to protect your product - yourself.

If you decide to put open source out there for others to use, then sure. You chose to allow that.

If you didn't license it for that, then it shouldn't be in an LLM.

And much as people joke about "exposure" not putting food on the table, being able to walk into a job interview with your name known because the company is already using your code/project is huge.

Exactly. If you are not actively going to compete in that space why not let someone else compete instead using your work?

If that someone then takes that work that you're providing for free to other people to build on it, makes a closed source product out of it and gives you no attribution, then you can be darn well sure I want to protect it.

> What harm is there to you if someone uses some of your code to build a business, as compared to not doing so? How are you worse off?

This someone might be someone I dislike. It would cause me some mild annoyance that they benefited from my effort.

It’s not healthy to let hypothetical spite guide your participation in civilization.

It's also not healthy to sip on whiskey or smoke some tobacco, but I do both on occasion.

Spite is also pretty pleasurable.

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