"One Reddit theory even suggested it was a deliberate rug pull designed to cripple the free site to push people towards paid products."
I know this isn't really the point of the article, but I've been thinking about this a lot. I wonder if we're going to see more resources go this way.
I used to publish little doo-dads as opensource software. Not because it was something that was legitimately ground breaking or anything (it absolutely wasn't) but because I had a problem, and I thought "heh wouldn't it be cool if someone else had a similar problem and could use my resource for it."
But now I'm really reluctant to give more stuff to the free web. Because the fact that it gets scraped and added to a pile of training data to later be monetized really rubs me the wrong way.
And I can see why maintainers of sites like this, or other free but incredibly useful resources might start to get irate at that.
I know this isn't really the point of the article, but I've been thinking about this a lot. I wonder if we're going to see more resources go this way.
I used to publish little doo-dads as opensource software. Not because it was something that was legitimately ground breaking or anything (it absolutely wasn't) but because I had a problem, and I thought "heh wouldn't it be cool if someone else had a similar problem and could use my resource for it."
But now I'm really reluctant to give more stuff to the free web. Because the fact that it gets scraped and added to a pile of training data to later be monetized really rubs me the wrong way.
And I can see why maintainers of sites like this, or other free but incredibly useful resources might start to get irate at that.