You mean people making contributions to solve problems and scratch each others' itches got displaced by people seeking social status and/or a do-at-your-own-pace accreditation outside of formal structures, to show to prospective employees? And now that LLMs start letting people solve their own coding problems, sidestepping their whole social game, the credit seekers complain because large corps did something they couldn't possibly have done?

I mean sure, their contributions were a critical piece - in aggregate - individually, any single piece of OSS code contributes approximately 0 value to LLM training. But they're somehow entitled to the reward for a vastly greater value someone is providing, just because they retroactively feel they contributed.

Or, looking from a different angle: what the complainers are saying is, they're sad they can't extract rent now that their past work became valuable for reasons they had no part in, and if they could turn back time, they'd happily rent-seek the shit out of their code, to the point of destroying LLMs as a possibility, and denying the world the value LLMs provided?

I have little sympathy for that argument. We've been calling out "copyright laundering" way before GPT-3 was a thing - those who don't like to contribute without capturing all the value for themselves should've moved off GitHub years ago. It's not like GitHub has any hold over OSS other than plain inertia (and the egos in the community - social signalling games create a network effect).