2026-06-29 -- Regarding: Not publishing software anymore
========================================================

In the previous entry, I wrote that I don't publish new software anymore
(at the moment).

The  reason is simple: Until 2026, I was able to live under the illusion
that nobody cares about my code anyway. Or maybe a few like-minded  peo-
ple,  but  that's it. No company (or other malevolent actors) would ever
grab my code and use it in proprietary systems, without  asking,  simply
disregarding  the  license. That was just super unlikely. None of what I
did was relevant enough for that to happen.

Hence I never needed to really worry about licenses. Never needed to de-
fend them.

And now we have AI crawlers, they use *everything*, and they don't  care
about  anything. (People in tech are so hyped that they even defend this
behavior.  "It's just like a  human  being  learning  how  to  program!"
Sigh.)

So, now, all of a sudden, my little naive software world collapsed.

Long  story  short:  I  don't want my code to be used by corporations. I
never wanted that. It doesn't even have to be *proprietary*.   Just  the
fact that they benefit from using *my work* sets me off. Very few corpo-
rations  help make the world a better place, most of them are malevolent
or, at best, useless. And I *especially* don't want AI companies to  use
my  stuff  -- they build new gas power plants and are just overall, sim-
ply, bad. (I have a list here[1].)

Hence the knee-jerk reaction of taking stuff offline.

When I'm being honest, GPLv3+ isn't enough, either. It still allows com-
mercial use. A hypothetical AI product could spit out my code  or  stuff
based  on  it  and always mention that it's GPL -- that would *still* be
shitty (new power plants, drives people into dependencies, ...). I think
what I'd like to see is a purely non-commercial software license.

That's probably just as naive.

I mean, there's The Anti-Capitalist Software License[2], which certainly
goes in the right direction ... Should I use that instead of GPLv3+?

But none of this even matters unless it's taken to court.  And  who  are
you  up  against? Billionaires. This is completely pointless. And that's
why it's so frustrating, really makes me want to take everything offline
right now.

As soon as something is online, it's going to be abused.

It's even worse: Now with AI crawlers, they don't even have  to  set  up
and  run my programs. The code doesn't have to solve any actual problem.
My programs could be extremely obscure and niche -- that would still  be
valuable.  Using  arcane  programming languages would be even more valu-
able. Just the mere fact that it's *code* or  *data*  is  valuable.  The
same  goes for blog posts or this phlog entry. It's a completely differ-
ent level of abuse than it was before.

Moving everything to Gopher or Gemini wouldn't help, either.

If anything, you'd have to make grabbing content *really expensive*.  So
expensive that it's no longer commerically viable  (while  at  the  same
time  still  accessible  to human users). That's the only way out that I
can see.

____________________

[1]:  https://movq.de/noai.html

[2]:  https://anticapitalist.software/