Henri Bergius adopts strong copyleft to raise the cost of AI-driven extraction

Bergius moved his default open-source license from MIT to EUPL-1.2, a strong-copyleft license that closes the loophole permissive terms leave for SaaS use. He put the reasoning plainly: "If corporations don't want to use our software under our terms, they are free to spend the effort or tokens to build their own." The post had reached 83 points and 83 comments on Hacker News roughly two and a half hours after publication. The discussion thread was not read for this item, so its reception is still forming. Codeberg, Debian, GCC, and the Rust project have all introduced rules about AI and code over the past two months. Bergius took a different route by changing his default license instead of banning AI-assisted contributions.

Why it matters: a move from MIT to strong copyleft changes the terms for corporate reuse without requiring a project to detect or police AI use. Teams that depend on permissively licensed upstream code need to watch for similar license changes.