> There are plenty of commercial pirates, and those commercial uses were grouped in with noncommercial sharing
I don't think many people were particularly sympathetic to people making money off piracy - by and large, people were upset because people committing piracy for personal use were getting hit with the kinds of fines and legal charges usually reserved for, well, people who make money off piracy.
> Am I wrong in assuming most of this scraping comes from people utilizing AI agents for things like AI-assisted coding?
Yes. The huge increases in traffic aren't from, say, Claude going and querying Github when you ask it to, it's from the scraping to drive the initial training process. Claude and the others know the first thing about code because Github and StackOverflow were part of their training corpus, because the companies which made them scraped the whole damn site and used it as part of their training data for making a ~competing product. That's what Github's reacting to, that's what Reddit reacted to, that's what everyone's been reacting to - it's the scraping of the data for training that's leading to these reactions.
To be clear, because I think this is maybe a core of our disagreement: The problem that's leading to this isn't LLM agents acting on behalf of a user - it's not that Cursor googled python code for you - it's that the various companies training the models are aggressively scraping everything they can get their hands on. It's not one request for one repo on behalf of one user, it's the wholesale scraping of everything on the site by a rival company to make a rival product, most likely in violation of terms of service and certainly in violation of anything that anyone could reasonably assume another corporate entity would stand for. Github's not mad at you, they're mad at OpenAI.
> There is tons of software on Github written by users who wish for their work to remain open access. Is that the class of software and people you believe should be shuffled around into smaller and smaller services that haven't yet abandoned the commitments that allowed them to become popular?
You store your money in a bank. The bank gets robbed repeatedly by an organized group of serial bank robbers, and increases security at the branch. You move your money to another bank, because the increased security annoys you. You understand the problem here may repeat itself elsewhere as well, right?