This is one of the reasons I'm keeping tests to myself for a current project. Usually I release libraries as open source, but I've been rethinking that, as well.
Oddly enough my conclusion is the opposite: I should invest more of my open source development work in creating language-independent test suites, because they can be used to quickly create all sorts of useful follow-on projects.
> Why are you making your stuff open source in the first place if you don't want other people to build off of it?
Because I enjoy the craft. I will enjoy it less if I know I'm being ripped off, likely for profit, hence my deliberate choices of licenses, what gets released and what gets siloed.
I'm happy if someone builds off of my work, as long as it's on my own terms.
Open source has three main purposes, in decreasing order of importance:
1) Ensuring that there is no malicious code and enabling you to build it yourself.
2) Making modifications for yourself (Stallman's printer is the famous example).
3) Using other people's code in your own projects.
Item 3) is wildly over-propagandized as the sole reason for open source. Hard forks have traditionally led to massive flame wars.
We are now being told by corporations and their "AI" shills that we should diligently publish everything for free so the IP thieves can profit more easily. There is no reason to oblige them. Hiding test suites in order to make translations more difficult is a great first step.
> Hard forks have traditionally led to massive flame wars.
Provided that the project is popular and has a community, especially a contributor community (the two don't have to go together.) Most projects aren't that prominent.
I think the only non-slop parts of the web are: open source, wikipedia, arXiv, some game worlds and social network comments in well behaved/moderated communities. What do they share in common? They all allow building on top, they are social first, people come together for interaction and collaboration.
The rest is enshittified web, focused on attention grabbing, retention dark patterns and misinformation. They all exist to make a profit off our backs.
A pattern I see is that we moved on from passive consumption and now want interactivity, sociality and reuse. We like to create together.
If you don't trust the AI generated code yourself, then you wont benefit from it. And in fact all it does is take resources from the project that you work on, the one that's generating all the value in the first place.
There are strong parallels to the image generation models that generate images in the style of studio ghibli films. Does that benefit studio ghibli? I'd argue not. And if we're not careful, it will to undermine the business model that produced the artwork in the first place (which the AI is not currently capable of doing).
