Why is that bad?
Mononoke and Sapling are open source systems. Why shouldn't new software take inspiration from how they are designed?
I saw RMS give a talk once on Free Software. He wore three quarter length cargo pants and sandals with no socks, and spent a good amount of the talk picking a scab off his shin to the point where he started bleeding. It got on his fingers. No one said anything.
There are things in this world that people can and should be stopped from doing, and there which anyone can do unhindered if they so wish. In between those two boundaries there’s a standard of decent behavior that one should strive for in order to be considered a good person.
Giving credit isn’t required, but many consider it basic decency.
"I built a thing in the style of X" (which is even more charitable than what Anthropic piece said) is different than "I incorporated X from Y to build a thing this way."
From my post:
> And, to be clear, I do not have a problem with Anthropic copying Mononoke’s design. (This is part of why we put out open source — to benefit humanity through the spread of good ideas.)
> But as LLMs continue to assist in designing new systems, they are likely to index heavily on existing designs. Mononoke is open source and in every LLM’s training set. If you ask Opus 5.5 or GPT-6 Astra (thanks Matthew Fowle) about prior art, they both immediately point out the similarities to Mononoke.
> Giving credit to those that came before us is now easier — and more important — than ever. There is no longer an excuse.