Well, now, the topic has shifted to discussing the extent that LLMs make clean room rewrites of copyleft-licensed code possible. So in a similar vein, a corpo who wanted to use such code but avoid the licensing terms might consider just having a robot reimplement it in an afternoon or less.
Sure, and that's fine, they're not using your code anymore if they do that, right? If you're not in it for the money, and your interest is primarily in getting something innovative off the ground, what do you care if someone else comes along and does it better without using anything you did besides just copying your idea? It still got done, didn't it? The itch still got scratched, didn't it? Go scratch another itch instead, or come back with a competitive edge of your own if it "owning and controlling" your idea is that important.
Someone just straight-up copying you has always been a big risk in business of all kinds. "First mover advantage" is a concept in business that's more "warning" than "descriptor of a winning scenario."
Generally speaking the traditional education on that topic says "well great, you've just invented something new and fancy, and you're the first to market with a genuinely new idea, an innovative concept, and it works, and you've got your supply chain all set up, manufacturing and fulfillment logistics done, and you're putting YOUR fancy new idea AND brand into real paying customers' hands. Good for you! Now that you've shown every other wily asshole in the world with more money than brains what your idea is, how it works, and that it's profitable, literally everyone's going to be trying to copy-cat you, do what you do only better/cheaper/faster, and they're coming for the whole pie, not just a slice of it."
iRobot and Tivo are rather famous examples. For almost a decade they absolutely
dominated in their fields, having practically invented them out of whole cloth and facing no genuine competition for a good long time. Tivo is probably responsible for more cord-cutting than any other factor; they blazed the trail in convincing people they could/should watch only what they want (and nothing they don't want), when they wanted (not when the broadcaster commanded), and skip all the ads. Roomba proved that yes, a stupid little disc-shaped plastic robot actually
could effectively keep a floor reasonably clean and substantially reduce (albeit not eliminate) the need to sweep (and eventually mop) most kinds of floors.
But then came copycats and industry changes that ultimately killed the originals. Everybody knows what a "Roomba" is now, even though you can't buy one anymore. They're like "Kleenex" -- the brand name because a generic term, and now
everybody makes "roombas" even though iRobot is gone (long since bought out and shut down). Tivo was on that road of becoming a generic term, but they couldn't quite hold on long enough to their competitive edge and the generic term became "DVR," then Tivo just sort of petered out and died off. No other DVR has ever come close to how good the OG Tivos were, but they were all "good enough" to compete, so everybody just rolled their own version of it instead of licensing it from Tivo and killed off the OG.