Also technological innovation kinda halted in the recent years. That's why you see everything being filled with unnecessary AI in the name of technological advancement. If there's no innovation for growth, all that remains is to extract more value from existing platforms, hence the current enshittification of everything.

I've contributed to open projects that required attribution before. None of it's ever been attributed.

I don't think they foresaw this level of corporate exploitation when they chose a permissive license. But that's our own stupidity. Always expect the worst from crony capitalists.

Realistically how were they going to stop them? I mean, practically speaking.

They offer the entire thing free to download and no slop company has ever hesitated to steal literary work from actual publishing companies and authors that are currently suing them.

Seems to me like their options were get paid or not get paid.

Are you fucking kidding me.

Thats the one 😂

They couldn't send a Cease and Desist for the server load?

1. Send one to whom? A WHOIS of the Brazilian IP that turns out to be a residential proxy? Anonymous scraping for LLMs is a problem all over the Internet without a solution (save Anubis). There's a reason all the big companies have went for Cloudflare instead of any lawsuits, which you'd hear in the news.
2. Google has always been correctly attributing Wikipedia content in their info cards before the rise of LLMs and Wikimedia Enterprise has always been made for that purpose. With how much they impact the server load while also being a big driver a traffic, Google clearly needed to be moved off the public infrastructure but it would also be unreasonable to shut them off and starve the site off a big source of contributors. Paying for better service beyond reasonable, individual, volunteer use has been common practice since Red Hat and commercial support, and now Tidelift. See also Grafana and the OpenStreetMap ecosystem.
3. They're not even sure if they have the standing; they've looked at that question:

Overall, it is more likely than not if current precedent holds that training systems on copyrighted data will be covered by fair use in the United States, but there is significant uncertainty at time of writing.

—https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikilegal/Copyright_Analysis_of_ChatGPT

I didn't know that I had to preemptively defend the Foundation.

well you shouldn't either. I am simply representing the perspective of contributors as a signatory myself, and as a developer who makes API calls to Wikipedia. "Our content is always free to use, but our infrastructure is not" sums it up nicely and Wikimedia Enterprise keeps the free infrastructure good.

Of course, union-busting is completely unacceptable and is rightly condemned.

My comment was more of a general warning against—despite all the justified criticism—allowing ourselves to be divided and discrediting Wikipedia as a project.

If we look at how the right wing influences the world, this is exactly how it works: Instead of working from the outside to destroy an institution or movement, they use the media power they’ve bought up over time to deepen existing internal tensions and further polarize the situation.

That’s very likely not the case with this blog, but I wouldn’t be surprised if actors from the far-right were to seize on this issue to discredit Wikipedia and Wikimedia as a whole. If the project were to end, it would ultimately do far more harm to us as a general public than the problematic handling of workers’ rights… especially in these times, when there are enough fascists for whom Wikipedia is a thorn in their side.