

His point seems to be rather that he has been using a monetisation approach to his work where he released his work open source and then used the exposure of it to sell his services, which is now being taken away because LLMs hide him from the equation and all the person sees on the other side is “ai solved it for me”. That sounds to me more like a business model that leverages open source, which he is now considering changing and charging everyone instead because his previous one is being made impossible. It doesn’t sound like he is doing this as a hobby, but as a job. It’s not different than being a self employed photographer, writer etc - all the other professions which are revolting against AI for the exact same reason.
To your metaphor, it’s more akin to someone going around the street and recording the best songs of every musician there and then putting it on YouTube with a label of “don’t bother going to this place, here’s the music you wanted”. Not only do they not get money directly, nor are they getting any credit or royalty but it even removes the chance of them getting anything out of it, even if it’s just exposure to further their career.
I’m pretty sure few people will bask for 6-8 hours a day every day as a hobby without hoping to get something for it.
To your last point…Isn’t the definition of charity pretty much along the lines of offering services or resources to others without the expectation of profit? I get your point if it applies to the “I wrote some code which works for me, you can have it as is, good luck” situation alone but that’s incredibly rare in open source projects with any popularity (i.e. real users) - a lot of time and effort goes into supporting people and doing things you wouldn’t do for yourself.

I can’t say I know the answer but a few ideas:
You could try it again, create the domain in the config and then do absolutely nothing. Don’t try to confirm it works in any way. If you don’t see the same behaviour you can do one of the above and then the other and see when it kicks in. If it gets picked up without you doing anything…then pass!