The foundation to which all of these licenses are tied to will likely be dissolved. Words/code had value in the old system. But now it's cheap to generate, way cheaper than hiring legions of writers/developers to write it. When it was a valuable asset lobbyists spent to protect it under law. I want you to think as you read this comment, do you think Disney would rather pay unionized workers or abolish copyright law and use other (trademark) mechanisms to protect their IP? A decade or so ago, this kind of thought would be crazy but things have changed.

So we have this foundation, this anchor which is copyright law that gives us any power to have a say about whether code should be accessible. Without that, the licenses are empty words, no weight. No remedy. My concern is less that opensource code gets used by commercial interests; I would rather they use libraries that are maintained especially in contexts of security... my concern is that we move toward only having devices we can keep as long as the company supports them and/or is solvent. If we lose the foundation that everything was built on (copyright law), it becomes impossible to audit or support things on our own. Everything is a rental/subscription.

I don't often just come out and make predictions, this is one I think we're moving toward though as the sea becomes more muddied by regurgitated works. The major AI companies are unabashedly pirating works, there are powerful rights-holders that could be sending armies of lawyers after them, like the big publishing houses... but is it happening? Or are they sitting back and letting the tech companies do R&D for what will be their new business models moving forward.