The entire argument is framed through an anti-open-source view which sees participation as entirely motivated by money.
It's an unfortunate presentation that makes it more difficult to sympathise with - and ultimately it may not matter; either somebody else will fill the gap or the LLMs he resents will help coders create their products without the libraries he seems to think are valueless without a set financial cost.
It's a sad world (or sad Internet) that when people do anything there's always a question of how to monetize it. Upload videos of you being goofy? "You should start a series! Make them longer than 8 minutes and you can qualify for YouTube ad money!". Write a blog? Similar stuff. TikTok? Go viral and maybe you'll find someone to pay you for... something.
And there's incentive reversal, I once saw someone who vlogs daily, his aim was to qualify for YouTube ad money, so everyday he rants for at least 8 minutes about how his life sucks and girls hate him (but that's fine because they just want to scam him for alimony anyway)...
> which sees participation as entirely motivated by money.
I think it’s rather that people need to eat. He admits that some wealthy devs will continue to work for free (do charity basically) but for those who want to make a living from OSS it will be harder and harder.
But yea as you said ultimately it probably won’t matter that much.
They do and always did. But open source was originally not about that, but about building something cool and letting others build on that. And, crucially, about GPL preventing large companies from extinguishing your work "because copyright". I remember Bill Gates calling GPL a spreading virus that tech world has to fight.
Sometime along this path monetizing open source became a thing. Now it is apparently becoming less lucrative. OK. That's the nature of changes, but IMO it does not kill open source. It might eventually make it even better, as commercial open source has become too widespread and money corrupts. My 2c.
Being old(ish) I recall in the early 90s Stallman advocating for (and mostly winning the argument in the tech circles at the time) open source as the primary tool for freedom to build things. With financial motivation possible, but completely orthogonal to the development of the open source software.
And how his argument (he was also a strong proponent of freedom to fork and improve in ways that the original developer did not do/want/agree with) was used against him in the early Emacs-XEmacs wars. When he tried to advocate that developers should support his Emacs version because he was the one who built Emacs (with tech retort being that his version sucks, he does not want to let others change it, so the community will build the features they want in XEmacs, thank you very much).
I think viable financial models of the last 15-20 years morphed open source into something different (in a kind of embrace-extend way). But I think that "extinguish" is very hard with OSS, so with financial models becoming less viable, open source might morph back somewhat. Or not; we shall see.
This is demonstrating the difference that still exists between free software and open source. People who use GPL/AGPL want it to be shared and spread vs others using source as means to an end other than more/better software. There is still a problem with AI/LLMs though that basically de-GPL such licensed source.
You're thinking of open source projects that only need a few hours of work per week. Anything more than a few hours a week either requires someone to give up their full time job to work on it (switch to part time jobs/consultation is an option), or having multiple contributors which still require significant effort to coordinate at the end of the day.
Let's say Tailwind CSS gives up and stops the project, do you think there'll be someone else picking it up, knowing how Tailwind failed in the first place? LLMs don't create new things, they remix what are already available. It's delusional to think that you should use LLMs to create a whole UI library just for your application and spend enormous effort not only maintaining it but also train new team members to use it down the road.
Open source is charity, it's unreasonable, even entitled, to demand someone work on it full time without pay.
In my experience, people are willing to contribute up to 10 hours/week to individual volunteer projects they care about. That may increase to up to 20 hours/week for a year or two when they assume a key role.
A full-time job takes a third of your waking hours. Then you probably need to spend another third on various maintenance activities, leaving you with the equivalent of a full-time job to spend as you see fit.
Of course, when you have a volunteer-run project, your priorities will be different from projects that people do for a living. You will probably focus on what the contributors find interesting or important, rather than what someone else might find useful or valuable.
Open source is charity, it's unreasonable, even entitled, to demand someone work on it full time without pay
Of course, but equally it's also unreasonable and entitled to assume that if you work on it full time (or any time at all) that that work deserves or will receive a fair (or any) financial return. That's not what open source is about, and the featured post seems to miss that.
This is a foreign position to me. I open sourced my code not to make money but because I saw that others can benefit from it. I never made money from open source. If I did my mental model would be that these are charitable donations, not an income stream I can rely on.
I've "made money" from my relatively limited open source contributions primarily by being moved straight past coding stages when interviewing a few times. That's enough payoff for me. Other than that it's mostly a "why not?"
There are some - very limited - pieces of code I keep private relating to my consulting business, but I've seen more downside in keeping code private over the years than not. E.g. lots of code I've written that are locked up in companies that no longer use it that I wish I could still use.
The proportion of code I have that would create a moat that makes it worth holding the code back is miniscule.
> Some OSS will keep going - wealthy devs doing it for fun or education. That's not a system, that's charity.
I'm all for non-monetary motives, but the reality is that most people have to work for a living, leaving quite limited time/energy for volunteering. The scale of OSS that we have today would not (perhaps sadly) be possible without OSS development paying the bills.
> Some OSS will keep going - wealthy devs doing it for fun or education. That's not a system, that's charity.
I read that. That statement is technically true but I don't like that they put a negative connotation around it. Apologies if they didn't intend it like that.
But I'll say that there is nothing wrong with charity. Some devs will do open source with hope to monetize. Some will do it for charity. Both are equally valid motivations.
I worked for 13 years on open source software and I definitely did it to make money. Nothing wrong with trying to make money on open source software, it's just a different business model than proprietary. More consulting oriented than product oriented.
That's cool, and I'm happy for you that you are in a position that allows you to get income from other sources, so that you can write OS code in your spare time.
Not everyone can or wants to go this way, though, and we got a number of fantastic tools and libraries thanks to people who tried and succeeded in making money from open source. Some folks live off donations, some are paid by their employers to write OS, and some added extra features that allowed them to both offer their tools for free and to monetize them at the same time. It's sad that the last path starts to disappear, at least for some tools. In the end it probably will result in fewer OS libraries, because some number of authors will have to either find another income stream, or abandon their projects.
It would not, actually, maximize my usefulness to others. They way you do it is making your work maximally available and exapndable so others can build on it. The end result is greater than the sum of its parts. So... open source.
My point is that I don't see a reason why someone making money off my work that I donate should bother me. But again, this is MY stance, clearly it's not an universal outlook. What I wanted to challenge was underlying assumption that someone making money off your code and not giving you any back is a problem or that is _should_ be a problem. It might bother some, but it's not an universal assumption.
I feel the same way as this person, but I’m leaning even more into open-source. I’m building an open-source SaaS for every vertical and even though it’s open-source, we offer cloud hosting, yet most users deploy on their servers. Our cloud hosting is just one source of monetization, our main monetization is a decentralized marketplace around these SaaS.
My point is, monetizing open-source is really hard. Tailwind was giving bricks away for free while selling you a house. Given enough time, people used those bricks to build houses and gave them away for free.
I'm writing OSS code with the intent to replace git. I know my position is very different, but to me openness is not a critical vulnerability when facing big companies but my secret weapon.
For me the best outcome is taking over all the market currently held by git and GitHub, and the worst outcome would be that Microsoft somehow pulls an embrace-extend-extinguish on us. But my goal, and I think I've been successful here, is to slam the door in the face of anyone who would be able to easily improve on my work and therefore would be able to undercut my value proposition with theirs. We want to be the first people offering a strongly differentiated service by building a platform that does not in any way sit on top of the MS platform, so that nothing we do is actually a direct benefit to them anyway and we actually get consumers excited about change!
This is the same death grip that Microsoft currently has on OSS. They made their tools so ubiquitous that even their most vigorous competitors make things that just feel like knock-offs because the competitors can't afford not to build on top of the same open core as MS: git and LSP. If you can't beat them you have to join them, and so I know exactly what I need to do to win: tweak the economic incentives until joining me is preferable to competing with me, and then instead of charity we'll simply take GitHub's billions in revenue as our revenue.
I think I do need to replace it to gain a competitive advantage against an incumbent the size of Microsoft. But to replace it at all I would have to build something that is, at least in a few ways, much, much better, otherwise people wouldn't have any reason to give me a moment's consideration. This market has to be won over from the bottom up.
But yes, even though git is as FOSS as FOSS can be, to me it's still a crucial element of Microsoft's power. It has not escaped my notice that Github managed to turn a popular piece of OSS into a successful, profitable company. Apparently many young coders are surprised to learn that Git and GitHub are not the same thing...
git works perfectly well. git is an afterthought. Engineers need to know git the same way they need to know markdown or SQL.
The complexity of git is becoming less relevant by the day as coding agents take over coding responsibilities.
If your git replacement is optimized for LLM use in ways that git cannot be optimized, you may get some traction.
By all conventional measures, git appears to be peak human-centered source control, with nearly every major company, software authoring tool, agent and SWE invested in using it.
If I have two advantages it's that nobody else is crazy enough to try this, and I'm not doing it as a vendetta at all. It started out as a toy project; I was just pushing the boundaries of what was possible with streaming parsers for fun. I only realized much later that I'd accidentally solved problems that were critical to version control.
By being nothing at all like them. The best current analog for the kind of code forge we'd build is Unison's forge, e.g. here's a library hosted on it: https://share.unison-lang.org/@ceedubs/folds
Notice that lines and columns are completely absent in this UX! It's a forge for semantic trees of code rather than text files of code.
I think they're only scratching the surface of what you can do when you shatter the line/col paradigm. Most importantly you have to use the Unison programming language to use the Unison code forge. I won't have this limitation at all. Anything you can parse into a standard syntax tree you'll be able to host on my semantic forge, and also I'll be able to put a fully-featured code editor right in the forge site so contributors can get started without ever even leaving their browser.
There's 50 years of tech debt in lines and columns which can be traced back through git to patch and then to TTY and to actual typewriters on which you had to feed the paper a line and return the carriage. Line and column are how you break down (and address into) code when code is written on a simulation of a stack of punchcards
Interesting, because one of git's philosophies is to not try to be clever about that (in reaction to a general trend in version control at the time of trying to make diffing and merging more clever: Linus felt this just tended to make the breakage less obvious).
I respect the hell of those philosophies because of how far Linux and git have made it, which they've done by winning people over with good, solid choices. I would hope I'd be a good enough engineer to make the same choices if I saw the same things Linus saw 20 years ago. But it's 20 years later and I'm looking at the next 20 years and I see a different landscape and it causes me to have a different outlook. I think code literacy is a hugely important right now as a battle is fought over whether people will own their technology.
If many people are literate in code, the likelihood is far greater that they will own the tech and it will be open source and built according to principles that make software accountable to them. If most people are illiterate in code, they will become subjects to proprietary technology forced to use products which they have no control over.
The problem is that code literacy hasn't moved beyond the era where developers are people who own a physical keyboard and a full-size computer monitor, use a filesystem regularly, and are able to install and run native applications on their laptop or desktop. But here you've got the next generation of programmers who need to become literate in code (so that they won't become subservient to it) and for many all they have are touchscreens: phones and tablets. Maybe they're on a shared device where they can't or don't want to install software. They might not know what a filesystem or x86 machine code is. That's why I'm on mission to make code literacy and the ability to contribute to open source a matter as simple as having a screen and a browser.
To reply more directly to the difference in philosophy around merging diffs, I think the git philosophy on preferring to expose potential conflicts rather than glossing over them is basically exactly right, because it creates a system to resolve ambiguity by capturing user intent. If I have any complaint it's that some types of ambiguities are not captured because they are not the result of textually overlapping changes. The canonical example would be a scenario where one developer renames a function and another adds a new usage of it. Git can see no text conflict and so it glosses over the semantic problem. A semantic system would be able to expose not only all the potential conflicts/ambiguities that git can see, but also some that it cannot. And in the case of an add/rename conflict the system should just handle it because the semantic intent of each change was recorded in the system: not "change these 8 call sites" but "change every site that calls this function."
Yeah it can be, but you'd really prefer to know without having to go do an exhaustive search I think. The closer to the root cause you catch the problem the easier it will be to tell what happened. Plus, it's not always easy to run exactly the right tests and to run them at exactly the moment they're needed. I usually won't run the whole test suite on each commit if I'm just doing a rebase, say, but it would still be nice if I didn't sail past a problem that I would later have to retrace my steps to fix.
The amount of code changes as seen in a git diff is roughly close to the amount of text changes. So reviewing is scaled linear with the change. In the way your are diffing are there any confounding changes? i.e. I make what seems like a small textual diff but it realigns the whole model of the code base that causes your diff to look like a big chunk of your code base is changed? Maybe that's a good thing? Just thinking out loud, I can't say I have an understanding about what your methodology is.
The methodology is like a codemod or a lint rule. If you've worked with codemods you usually review a combination of the (small) script that describes the intent behind the changes you want and the (larger) diff of (text) changes that were generated by applying the codemod.
Microsoft could probably look to run things like GitHub at a loss, picking up equity via their integrations and leveraging any data customers publish on GitHub to ingest into their own AI or sell to others.
Sure, but if I wanted to I could also look to run at a loss for pretty much the same reasons. In either case it's a (profit-motivated) strategy to capture and hold a critical market.
There's no complexity in understanding an OSS author wanting to make money out of their hard work. People forget that OSS is about providing something useful to the world for free because they choose to do so. And anyone who doesn't want to follow this, or chooses to transition to a new model, should be respected with their decision. Accusing them of "greed" is to be out of touch and out of taste. This is as much a personal matter as it is about the current and future state of OSS in general.
What do we think the future is going to looks like?
"I need a caching component in my stack. Oh, I just let AI create it from scratch, so AI can also run it, maintain it etc."
or
"I need a caching component in my stack. Oh, let me just grab an existing, well maintained and supported cache component and let AI write the glue logic to run it, maintain it etc."
Personally I think it will be the second one. There definitely is a case for generating one off tools but I don't think AI will replace established, well written and maintained software (being it open-source or not).
Not all software is equal. I can get 80% of my new SaaS to be generated by AI as it's mostly considered boilerplate and mostly the same as any other SaaS. It's the 20% that makes it unique OR something that AI can't touch like a special relationship with a supplier or a first to market position etc.
But I use open source software because I can see and alter what's running. When you do this in a community of other developers, even as a user, you get a lot of stuff for free. I write FOSS software because I want to use it. I know the economics require give and take.
Yes, LLMs are all take. Yes, they bastardise the licenses and abuse the model. But they don't change why I want to use open source software. They don't change the fact that people need to keep writing it to keep receiving it.
Long story short, I think a lot fewer people are going to use Marc's software. He might be okay with the commercial realities of this (it might be a runaway success) but I think as non-developers get more acquainted with LLMs, being able to ask a bot to change how your system works is going to be more popular, not less, even if it's not the model RMS wanted.
I don't mean to trivialize the OP's experience. This is definitely a very important matter and serious issue in the industry. So forgive me for raising a much smaller, side point.
> I've contributed millions of lines of carefully written OSS code over the past decade
I have never tracked my own output, but I would be surprised if I have written even a single million lines of code, let alone several.
Out of curiosity, is this common? Have people here actually written millions of lines of code themselves? Even assuming two million lines over thirty years, that still averages to around 180 lines per day, every day. It is doable but it is a very high level of sustained output.
I am not doubting the OP. Just noting that this represents an extraordinary amount of coding by any measure.
Also I find it interesting describing it carefully written. To me that most likely would indicate something that has been reviewed, rewritten and reconsidered multiple times. Thus bringing down the total number of lines. As there would be significant time spend on same lines.
Or would anyone disagree that carefully written code takes more time and in the end probably results lot less lines produced in total?
Might be true, might not be true. Don't make the mistake of comparing lines of code with quality and usefulness of programs. I'm not saying you do, but don't even entertain that thought. ;)
I've never thought of open source as something you can make money on directly. It's hard to see how it benefits an IC economically, besides getting some recognition and a sense of pride.
Open source has always felt explicitly like a benefit for companies.
- They get free code, buy vs build is irrelevant when you can just pip install.
- Systems become largely homogenized, thus contributors are replaceable.
- They get an established pool of workers who know the technology already, no training required.
- They get free labor from contributors outside their organization maintaining their dependencies for them in perpetuity.
It's a great deal for employers! Especially if they forbid their employees from contributing back! If you work out the game theory, there's literally no reason for a company to do anything but sit back and siphon the benefits for themselves.
This doesn't really change with LLMs, it just makes the end game much more explicit. The goal was always to capture the intellectual output of open source contributors for private profit. Always. Now that it's actually happening, who's really shocked?
To add: This is okay in early organizations. In larger organizations, the risk of malicious code entering your systems is much greater. So I think FOSS benefits small companies more than large companies, which seems good.
While the observations might be true, I’m not sure going closed source is going to help here. If optimizing docs for AI makes you less visible, guess what else makes you less visible : not even being accessible.
Just because AI is "taking advantage" of projects being open source doesn’t mean the solution is direct closed source. Going with the most direct solution to a problem is an indication you might not have spent time thinking deeper about the problem
My OSS project wasn’t nearly as well used, but it also was making someone else money, and I also put a lot of time into it without getting paid.
I never had the time or understanding to setup a business around it, so in the end I just got rid of everything. No more open source unless it’s purely for my own enjoyment.
I’m VERY appreciative of free and open source projects and organizations that don’t try to make money. The FSF, GNU, Linux- I love these! I would love if the world just focused on these! I would use a Linux desktop and phone if they were in that Apple sweetspot (iOS 26 not included) of ease for techs and non-techs.
What I’ve noticed about successful open-source projects is that they have:
- a strong leader, who has dedicated their life to it, not as a secondary initiative, and who one day knows they must hand the reins to another
- a willing team that continues to bring in “new meat”
- a project that sells itself by filling a need that will remain for some time by many
- no need or desire for money
Those that end in failure involve:
- a leader/team that sees it as part-time volunteer work, and they do it because it makes them feel good about themselves; they are giving back
- the assumption that one day maybe they’ll get paid
Monetizing open source never made sense for me. Mostly because I operate from selfish viewpoint. Why would I pay for something that is provided for free? It is starting to seem like I was right. You have to fund it from selling a product. Or be one of the few that are valuable enough to be paid for running it. But those are exceedingly rare in total population and don't make scalable business model.
I don’t think this will be possible for many open core projects. Often the premium features are the more complex and difficult ones.
If you could generate those you don’t need the project at all anymore you can just generate the whole thing.
Of course that is the wet dream of VCs and would make programmers completely obsolete but I don’t think it’s realistic (at least not anytime soon)
Part of me says that that could be handled with licenses, though for that to work the code probably no longer qualifies as open source either.
Also, I'd guess, the sort of people who are comfortable with asking an LLM to build the premium features are, uh, morally flexible enough to not care about licenses in the first place.
Well, no. Most people in the world get paid for doing a thing. I pay someone $X and they do Y for me and then I have the Y that I wanted done.
This can work for software too. Someone pays me to develop software that does something useful for them, and then they have the thing they wanted. For example if Wine is missing a feature someone can pay me to implement it, and then everyone involved is happy.
I agree it's a more challenging business model, but it does work.
Money must come from somewhere. And by selling a product I mean a phone. Or box doing something. With Wine, well Valve sells games and want those games to run on something else than platform they were build for.
In the end product is being sold originally to fund that development. Software can also be pure product enabling company to do something or consumer to do something. But in that case open-source is likely incidental. Not the product.
In your first comment you said, "why would I pay for [software] if it is provided for free?" And you're right, you don't. What you pay for is for someone to develop software/features that don't exist yet. Maybe the users of the phone you sell want some new feature. Then it's done and everyone's happy and even better you don't need to pay for the entire project to be built from scratch or pay ongoing license fees or whatever. That's how you monetize open source.
Igalia, Collabora, Red Hat, GCC, LLVM, Wine, the entire Linux kernel. Tons of open source consulting companies out there working on all kinds of projects.
It's almost always locking some features behind subscription.
Obviously, SSO is the best choice for most deployments. Enterprises (who will probably pay the most) will require SSO.
Open Source is the "free taste". Everyone knows, uses, and likes Grafana. When your company is looking for something, you'll recommend it because you're familiar with it. Your company will want things like SCIM or similar, and pay them for it.
It's harder for products that are trying to sell to smaller companies/individuals, but it still applies.
It's an incredibly complex topic, and I do feel for people who are now seeing a massive disruption to the existing ways to monetise their own work (they should be able to live comfortably).
It's quite ironic that they used an LLM to write or at least entirely re-format their post, when their topic is about the impact these systems have on the ongoing sustainability of the humans behind the work.
I personally don't use LLMs and generative models, I find their output way too untrustworthy and their practice of mining the data of others unsettling. Not that anything on the internet can be inherently trusted anyway.
It also seems like a weird prediction when agents make reproducing the API from a spec easier and easier. If an API is accessible, you can point your coding agent at it to refine a spec and local test suite.
You'd expect libraries-as-API (libraries that's previously be offered in code form but where people try to limit code access by offering it only as an API, as opposed to SaaS's where the API provided access to a larger system, gatekept data, or running infrastructure) to get incredibly hard to monetize too, unless they're extremely complex.
Unless your closed source code will be usable by llms more effectively then what's available today in oss, it's likely going to die off within the next decade or two.
There will continue to be a need for software developers for the foreseeable future, but the market will continue to trend toward more and more LLM generated code - no matter how this is seen by us developers.
Frustratingly, while I sympathize with their very real plight, I also have to agree with OP’s ultimate decision.
OSS was exploited by hyperscalers to build trillion-dollar industries atop of, but without ever suitably compensating, the creators of much of those tools for their work or sharing in the profit. Before AI, the community was already at a breaking point between private enterprise spouting “supply chain” bullshit at them to demand fixes and attention, or steamrolled small devs to prop up a big corp’s trademark or product, all the while never actually paying enough for the proper development and support of those products - look at NPM (leftpad and kik) as prime examples. Now you have these same big tech ghouls scraping small sites into oblivion with hostile bots, making token predictors that are deliberately engineered to never, ever direct someone to a primary source or site except as an absolute last resort (to keep folks “in app” for engagement metrics), and openly pitching AI coding agents as replacements for human coders forever.
In that context, it’s no fucking wonder that the OSS community is becoming increasingly hostile to the very norms that have left most of them broke and increasingly destitute. Hell, for up-and-coming devs emerging from bootcamps, the mantra of “contribute to OSS” makes zero sense in a Capitalist marketplace that’s pivoting hard towards AI-as-human-replacement; as the OP points out, why bother training your own replacement?
OSS won’t die, but this is a particularly painful chapter that emphasizes it cannot support itself through the (non-existent) generosity of Capital. Alternate funding schemes and organization models are needed to prepare and support it for the future, be they government grants, Academia sponsors, or outright Gov-funded Private or Public Corporations (e.g., BBC, Corporation for Public Broadcasting (RIP), etc). Updates to OSS licensing schemes barring use-cases or with more substantial teeth for commercial use are also needed, toeing the line between empowering users of general computing and extracting reasonable payments from businesses or enterprises.
Both the machines and "the system" are alive and well. Did it occurred to you that you're using machines (computers, internet, HN) created by the system to complain about the system?
The bitter truth is that we don't have any good alternative for both the machines and "the system".
For Luddites' and Marxists' chagrin, manual weaving was indeed a crappy job and "the system" brought what they'd call "advance in the means of production".
It is honestly depressing how many people have swallowed the capitalist pill so completely. Most people can't even fathom a world where cooperation actually works better than a cutthroat rat race.
It leads to these total room-temperature takes that the system is the only reason we have the internet or Hacker News. It is exhausting watching people parrot the same old clichés because they are too lazy to actually crack a history book.
The truth is that foundational tech was almost never market-driven. The architecture of the computer, the internet, and the Web were all products of the public commons. They were created by people motivated by discovery and utility rather than exit liquidity. Capital did not invent these things. It just showed up late, threw a fence around them, and started charging rent on human ingenuity it had nothing to do with.
Same goes for the Luddites. They were not anti-machine, they were just anti-starvation. They did not hate the loom. They hated that the loom was being used as a legal weapon to gut their labor rights while the owners hoarded 100 percent of the gains.
Using a computer to call this out is not hypocrisy. It is using a tool that was stolen from the human commons to argue for its return. If you think we owe our progress to the current ownership model, you are not paying attention. You have just been programmed by the marketing.
Hell, the whole idea of open-source on which the entire modern tech world is based upon, which the Internet and Hacker News itself thrived upon, is completely antithetical to capitalism.
The cambrian explosion of tech exists because someone decided to give intellectual property away for free.
I agree with you. My hope and dream is that society is able to move on not by regressing to Luddism, but by restoring technology's position to service the people, as a tool for making life better, rather than to mould, measure and control humanity. Remember the sad meme that the brightest minds of our generations are thinking about how to make people click on ads. It is tragic.
Whether you think it possible or not, this take misunderstands Marxism at a fundamental level.
For Marxists, automation is a good thing - in fact it is a core precondition of socialism.
Marx spent half the first chapter of the Communist Manifesto fanboying over capitalism for the productivity increases brought by capitalism.
So why do you think it was to the chagrin of Marxists? Marx spent decades cheering on the advancement of industrialisation, and specifically argued (in The German Ideology) that socialism would be impossible without these advances in productive forces.
Deng basically copied parts of Lenins "New Economic Policy" of "limited capitalism" because he like Lenin realised they'd made a mistake in preempting dismantling of the market, in direct contradiction of the Marxist view that a socialist revolution requires a well developed capitalist economy, and Marx explicit warning against attempting socialism too soon. That's what I pointed to with the reference to the German Ideology. Because of course taking out profit enough to do meaningful redistribution will harm growth. That's not a "gotcha" - it's an inherent, core assumption of Marxist thinking that socialism only becomes possible because of capitalism.
May I assume that the Cuban, North Korean, Laos and Vietnamese Communist parties aren't Marxist also? Naturally, same goes to former USSR, Khmer Rouge, etc
You are conflating Marxism with China, which is just a state-capitalist powerhouse using the exact same model of enclosure and rent-seeking we are arguing against. China doesn't "hand over" automation because capitalists are better at it; the state simply socializes the risk and R&D before letting private proxies handle the commercialization. Citing a state-backed monopoly system to prove "the market" is the only way to build tech is total nonsense.
The marxists got the first man in space while urbanizing (a decimated by WWII) population of serfs without favelas and slums. If that is a "fail", what would you call the 'wonders' brought by the last 30 yrs without them?
The essence of free software is and always has been charity.
Some people attempt to interface with capitalism via "open source" but that game is rigged to make previous winners continue to win so you missed the boat.
It's a mistake to link coding to how you get food, shelter, safety, etc. Do it for fun or not at all.
Tailwind makes more money than ever through donation, but that isn't a business. It's the tailwind proprietary themes that wasn't doing well. It's just bad to say tailwind is losing because of AI.
Tailwind being funded is evidence to me that there’s still far too much money in making software compared to the rest of society, not too little as the author would like us to think.
> Look at Tailwind: 75 million downloads/month, more popular than ever, revenue down 80%, docs traffic down 40%, 75% of engineering team laid off. Someone submitted a PR to add LLM-optimized docs and Wathan had to decline - optimizing for agents accelerates his business's death. He's being asked to build the infrastructure for his own obsolescence.
So what are the actual solutions, now that the cat is out of the bag?
Much like in the post, you could make it source available and have a free license for non-profits and development, but ask money for commercial usage, or different feature sets (like iframe-resizer, which we recently bought for a project, saved a bunch of time, but the AI models still were trained on it and knew how to use it). Or provide support, like many FOSS DBs and OSes should, same for libraries, maybe to have PostgreSQL dethrone Oracle and the likes just a little bit more.
Or maybe some ask-for-funding stuff defined at library level with the expectation that the AIs would present this information to whoever uses them. I don't particularly celebrate https://docs.npmjs.com/cli/v9/commands/npm-fund but I get why it's there - similarly we might get IDE plugins and CLI tools and such to present a summary of what libraries or projects were used/suggested in a task/chat session and how to give them money, much like how you'd get references to website sources when trying to ask AI to research something.
> My prediction: a new marketplace emerges, built for agents. Want your agent to use Tailwind? Prisma? Pay per access.
This probably already exists in the form of MCP solutions for up to date documentation for specific libraries and so on, to mitigate hallucinations.
Either way, we need to start implementing actual solutions so we don't keep ending up with https://staltz.com/software-below-the-poverty-line.html all the time. And not just some "human contract" approach of expecting that someone will go to your docs manually and see the banner that they can give you money for more bells and whistles or something. To me, that feels like wishful thinking.
AI or not, people's work should be rewarded and that needs some sort of standardization - and I hold that view even in regards to answering feature requests on GitHub, like if someone demands something, they should immediately have the option to place money into an escrow for when/if a solution is presented to them (or get the money back if not). If they don't, you have no obligation to help them unless from the goodness of your own heart and the innate desire to do so. Similarly, if I use 10 libraries, I should be able to say "Okay I have 50 bucks, I want to donate to all of these projects by executing a single npm command and confirming a PayPal payment or something."
Incidentally, that's also the first step towards building the Torment Nexus (capitalist incentives will find a way to turn this into a hellscape), but go figure.
This is pissing into the wind because in, the long run, AI will write the functionality it wanted to use instead because there are no magic or special libraries. Furthermore, it will eventually (over a long enough timescale) eat deeper down the stack by writing programming languages (with most incomprehensible to humans*), designing chips, designing systems, deploying code, planning datacenters, and designing products... this the manifestation of a gradual technological "singularity".
* This is how billionaire techbros will finally push most humans out of tech.
All they're doing now by putting up roadblocks is collectively punishing humans from competing with AI.
On the other side of the token, don't give away things and expect payment. Give things away because it's cool, not as a primary survival strategy based on mythological expectations of gratuity. It comes across as bitter giver's remorse. And unprofessional poison spewed onto social media also wrecks their professional reputation and drives customers away.
What you are saying is wrong and countered with hard data: LLMs produce and increase the use of tailwind not decrease it. Confirmed by the founder himself.
The entire argument is framed through an anti-open-source view which sees participation as entirely motivated by money.
It's an unfortunate presentation that makes it more difficult to sympathise with - and ultimately it may not matter; either somebody else will fill the gap or the LLMs he resents will help coders create their products without the libraries he seems to think are valueless without a set financial cost.
It's a sad world (or sad Internet) that when people do anything there's always a question of how to monetize it. Upload videos of you being goofy? "You should start a series! Make them longer than 8 minutes and you can qualify for YouTube ad money!". Write a blog? Similar stuff. TikTok? Go viral and maybe you'll find someone to pay you for... something.
And there's incentive reversal, I once saw someone who vlogs daily, his aim was to qualify for YouTube ad money, so everyday he rants for at least 8 minutes about how his life sucks and girls hate him (but that's fine because they just want to scam him for alimony anyway)...
> which sees participation as entirely motivated by money.
I think it’s rather that people need to eat. He admits that some wealthy devs will continue to work for free (do charity basically) but for those who want to make a living from OSS it will be harder and harder.
But yea as you said ultimately it probably won’t matter that much.
> I think it’s rather that people need to eat.
They do and always did. But open source was originally not about that, but about building something cool and letting others build on that. And, crucially, about GPL preventing large companies from extinguishing your work "because copyright". I remember Bill Gates calling GPL a spreading virus that tech world has to fight.
Sometime along this path monetizing open source became a thing. Now it is apparently becoming less lucrative. OK. That's the nature of changes, but IMO it does not kill open source. It might eventually make it even better, as commercial open source has become too widespread and money corrupts. My 2c.
I think free software was more about that about that. Open source always was about getting financially motivated companies onboard.
I am not absolutely sure, but I do not think so.
Being old(ish) I recall in the early 90s Stallman advocating for (and mostly winning the argument in the tech circles at the time) open source as the primary tool for freedom to build things. With financial motivation possible, but completely orthogonal to the development of the open source software.
And how his argument (he was also a strong proponent of freedom to fork and improve in ways that the original developer did not do/want/agree with) was used against him in the early Emacs-XEmacs wars. When he tried to advocate that developers should support his Emacs version because he was the one who built Emacs (with tech retort being that his version sucks, he does not want to let others change it, so the community will build the features they want in XEmacs, thank you very much).
I think viable financial models of the last 15-20 years morphed open source into something different (in a kind of embrace-extend way). But I think that "extinguish" is very hard with OSS, so with financial models becoming less viable, open source might morph back somewhat. Or not; we shall see.
This is demonstrating the difference that still exists between free software and open source. People who use GPL/AGPL want it to be shared and spread vs others using source as means to an end other than more/better software. There is still a problem with AI/LLMs though that basically de-GPL such licensed source.
You're thinking of open source projects that only need a few hours of work per week. Anything more than a few hours a week either requires someone to give up their full time job to work on it (switch to part time jobs/consultation is an option), or having multiple contributors which still require significant effort to coordinate at the end of the day.
Let's say Tailwind CSS gives up and stops the project, do you think there'll be someone else picking it up, knowing how Tailwind failed in the first place? LLMs don't create new things, they remix what are already available. It's delusional to think that you should use LLMs to create a whole UI library just for your application and spend enormous effort not only maintaining it but also train new team members to use it down the road.
Open source is charity, it's unreasonable, even entitled, to demand someone work on it full time without pay.
In my experience, people are willing to contribute up to 10 hours/week to individual volunteer projects they care about. That may increase to up to 20 hours/week for a year or two when they assume a key role.
A full-time job takes a third of your waking hours. Then you probably need to spend another third on various maintenance activities, leaving you with the equivalent of a full-time job to spend as you see fit.
Of course, when you have a volunteer-run project, your priorities will be different from projects that people do for a living. You will probably focus on what the contributors find interesting or important, rather than what someone else might find useful or valuable.
Open source is charity, it's unreasonable, even entitled, to demand someone work on it full time without pay
Of course, but equally it's also unreasonable and entitled to assume that if you work on it full time (or any time at all) that that work deserves or will receive a fair (or any) financial return. That's not what open source is about, and the featured post seems to miss that.
This is a foreign position to me. I open sourced my code not to make money but because I saw that others can benefit from it. I never made money from open source. If I did my mental model would be that these are charitable donations, not an income stream I can rely on.
I've "made money" from my relatively limited open source contributions primarily by being moved straight past coding stages when interviewing a few times. That's enough payoff for me. Other than that it's mostly a "why not?"
There are some - very limited - pieces of code I keep private relating to my consulting business, but I've seen more downside in keeping code private over the years than not. E.g. lots of code I've written that are locked up in companies that no longer use it that I wish I could still use.
The proportion of code I have that would create a moat that makes it worth holding the code back is miniscule.
The post mentions this:
> Some OSS will keep going - wealthy devs doing it for fun or education. That's not a system, that's charity.
I'm all for non-monetary motives, but the reality is that most people have to work for a living, leaving quite limited time/energy for volunteering. The scale of OSS that we have today would not (perhaps sadly) be possible without OSS development paying the bills.
> Some OSS will keep going - wealthy devs doing it for fun or education. That's not a system, that's charity.
I read that. That statement is technically true but I don't like that they put a negative connotation around it. Apologies if they didn't intend it like that.
But I'll say that there is nothing wrong with charity. Some devs will do open source with hope to monetize. Some will do it for charity. Both are equally valid motivations.
I worked for 13 years on open source software and I definitely did it to make money. Nothing wrong with trying to make money on open source software, it's just a different business model than proprietary. More consulting oriented than product oriented.
That's cool, and I'm happy for you that you are in a position that allows you to get income from other sources, so that you can write OS code in your spare time.
Not everyone can or wants to go this way, though, and we got a number of fantastic tools and libraries thanks to people who tried and succeeded in making money from open source. Some folks live off donations, some are paid by their employers to write OS, and some added extra features that allowed them to both offer their tools for free and to monetize them at the same time. It's sad that the last path starts to disappear, at least for some tools. In the end it probably will result in fewer OS libraries, because some number of authors will have to either find another income stream, or abandon their projects.
The problem is that’s ai is monetizing your code And not giving you anything
AI is also likely not following the terms of the license. I.e., for BSD it needs to include attribution.
So? If some other riser used my code to make money sould I be upset? Isn't it the whole point to me useful to others?
Some AI companies have jobs where human coders solve algo problems for model training.
Why not apply directly to those jobs and doing it for free? That would maximize your usefulness to others, would it not?
I'm actually asking, that's not a rhetoric question.
It would not, actually, maximize my usefulness to others. They way you do it is making your work maximally available and exapndable so others can build on it. The end result is greater than the sum of its parts. So... open source.
My point is that I don't see a reason why someone making money off my work that I donate should bother me. But again, this is MY stance, clearly it's not an universal outlook. What I wanted to challenge was underlying assumption that someone making money off your code and not giving you any back is a problem or that is _should_ be a problem. It might bother some, but it's not an universal assumption.
I feel the same way as this person, but I’m leaning even more into open-source. I’m building an open-source SaaS for every vertical and even though it’s open-source, we offer cloud hosting, yet most users deploy on their servers. Our cloud hosting is just one source of monetization, our main monetization is a decentralized marketplace around these SaaS.
My point is, monetizing open-source is really hard. Tailwind was giving bricks away for free while selling you a house. Given enough time, people used those bricks to build houses and gave them away for free.
I'm writing OSS code with the intent to replace git. I know my position is very different, but to me openness is not a critical vulnerability when facing big companies but my secret weapon.
For me the best outcome is taking over all the market currently held by git and GitHub, and the worst outcome would be that Microsoft somehow pulls an embrace-extend-extinguish on us. But my goal, and I think I've been successful here, is to slam the door in the face of anyone who would be able to easily improve on my work and therefore would be able to undercut my value proposition with theirs. We want to be the first people offering a strongly differentiated service by building a platform that does not in any way sit on top of the MS platform, so that nothing we do is actually a direct benefit to them anyway and we actually get consumers excited about change!
This is the same death grip that Microsoft currently has on OSS. They made their tools so ubiquitous that even their most vigorous competitors make things that just feel like knock-offs because the competitors can't afford not to build on top of the same open core as MS: git and LSP. If you can't beat them you have to join them, and so I know exactly what I need to do to win: tweak the economic incentives until joining me is preferable to competing with me, and then instead of charity we'll simply take GitHub's billions in revenue as our revenue.
Git is an OSS project and is not owned even slightly by Microsoft.
Github the website however is.
You don't need to replace git.
I think I do need to replace it to gain a competitive advantage against an incumbent the size of Microsoft. But to replace it at all I would have to build something that is, at least in a few ways, much, much better, otherwise people wouldn't have any reason to give me a moment's consideration. This market has to be won over from the bottom up.
But yes, even though git is as FOSS as FOSS can be, to me it's still a crucial element of Microsoft's power. It has not escaped my notice that Github managed to turn a popular piece of OSS into a successful, profitable company. Apparently many young coders are surprised to learn that Git and GitHub are not the same thing...
Vendetta code is not going to get you far.
git works perfectly well. git is an afterthought. Engineers need to know git the same way they need to know markdown or SQL.
The complexity of git is becoming less relevant by the day as coding agents take over coding responsibilities.
If your git replacement is optimized for LLM use in ways that git cannot be optimized, you may get some traction.
By all conventional measures, git appears to be peak human-centered source control, with nearly every major company, software authoring tool, agent and SWE invested in using it.
This may be one of the reddest oceans out there.
If I have two advantages it's that nobody else is crazy enough to try this, and I'm not doing it as a vendetta at all. It started out as a toy project; I was just pushing the boundaries of what was possible with streaming parsers for fun. I only realized much later that I'd accidentally solved problems that were critical to version control.
I agree githubs dominant position is an issue very much worth gnawing at. What's wrong with git though?
And how would OP differentiate from example Forgejo?
By being nothing at all like them. The best current analog for the kind of code forge we'd build is Unison's forge, e.g. here's a library hosted on it: https://share.unison-lang.org/@ceedubs/folds
Notice that lines and columns are completely absent in this UX! It's a forge for semantic trees of code rather than text files of code.
I think they're only scratching the surface of what you can do when you shatter the line/col paradigm. Most importantly you have to use the Unison programming language to use the Unison code forge. I won't have this limitation at all. Anything you can parse into a standard syntax tree you'll be able to host on my semantic forge, and also I'll be able to put a fully-featured code editor right in the forge site so contributors can get started without ever even leaving their browser.
Curious your thoughts on how we got here, with git being the dominant VCS. You do know how git rose to fame? Who wrote it? Why it was adopted?
It came from a need.
So what needs do we have that you solve?
I agree GitHub is evil. There’s GitLab, gitea, codeberg… self hosting, ssh like its old school git, you have other options.
Line and column.
There's 50 years of tech debt in lines and columns which can be traced back through git to patch and then to TTY and to actual typewriters on which you had to feed the paper a line and return the carriage. Line and column are how you break down (and address into) code when code is written on a simulation of a stack of punchcards
Interesting, because one of git's philosophies is to not try to be clever about that (in reaction to a general trend in version control at the time of trying to make diffing and merging more clever: Linus felt this just tended to make the breakage less obvious).
I respect the hell of those philosophies because of how far Linux and git have made it, which they've done by winning people over with good, solid choices. I would hope I'd be a good enough engineer to make the same choices if I saw the same things Linus saw 20 years ago. But it's 20 years later and I'm looking at the next 20 years and I see a different landscape and it causes me to have a different outlook. I think code literacy is a hugely important right now as a battle is fought over whether people will own their technology.
If many people are literate in code, the likelihood is far greater that they will own the tech and it will be open source and built according to principles that make software accountable to them. If most people are illiterate in code, they will become subjects to proprietary technology forced to use products which they have no control over.
The problem is that code literacy hasn't moved beyond the era where developers are people who own a physical keyboard and a full-size computer monitor, use a filesystem regularly, and are able to install and run native applications on their laptop or desktop. But here you've got the next generation of programmers who need to become literate in code (so that they won't become subservient to it) and for many all they have are touchscreens: phones and tablets. Maybe they're on a shared device where they can't or don't want to install software. They might not know what a filesystem or x86 machine code is. That's why I'm on mission to make code literacy and the ability to contribute to open source a matter as simple as having a screen and a browser.
To reply more directly to the difference in philosophy around merging diffs, I think the git philosophy on preferring to expose potential conflicts rather than glossing over them is basically exactly right, because it creates a system to resolve ambiguity by capturing user intent. If I have any complaint it's that some types of ambiguities are not captured because they are not the result of textually overlapping changes. The canonical example would be a scenario where one developer renames a function and another adds a new usage of it. Git can see no text conflict and so it glosses over the semantic problem. A semantic system would be able to expose not only all the potential conflicts/ambiguities that git can see, but also some that it cannot. And in the case of an add/rename conflict the system should just handle it because the semantic intent of each change was recorded in the system: not "change these 8 call sites" but "change every site that calls this function."
I suppose this canonical example would be papered over easily with minimal test coverage.
Yeah it can be, but you'd really prefer to know without having to go do an exhaustive search I think. The closer to the root cause you catch the problem the easier it will be to tell what happened. Plus, it's not always easy to run exactly the right tests and to run them at exactly the moment they're needed. I usually won't run the whole test suite on each commit if I'm just doing a rebase, say, but it would still be nice if I didn't sail past a problem that I would later have to retrace my steps to fix.
The amount of code changes as seen in a git diff is roughly close to the amount of text changes. So reviewing is scaled linear with the change. In the way your are diffing are there any confounding changes? i.e. I make what seems like a small textual diff but it realigns the whole model of the code base that causes your diff to look like a big chunk of your code base is changed? Maybe that's a good thing? Just thinking out loud, I can't say I have an understanding about what your methodology is.
The methodology is like a codemod or a lint rule. If you've worked with codemods you usually review a combination of the (small) script that describes the intent behind the changes you want and the (larger) diff of (text) changes that were generated by applying the codemod.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercurial
Microsoft could probably look to run things like GitHub at a loss, picking up equity via their integrations and leveraging any data customers publish on GitHub to ingest into their own AI or sell to others.
Sure, but if I wanted to I could also look to run at a loss for pretty much the same reasons. In either case it's a (profit-motivated) strategy to capture and hold a critical market.
There's no complexity in understanding an OSS author wanting to make money out of their hard work. People forget that OSS is about providing something useful to the world for free because they choose to do so. And anyone who doesn't want to follow this, or chooses to transition to a new model, should be respected with their decision. Accusing them of "greed" is to be out of touch and out of taste. This is as much a personal matter as it is about the current and future state of OSS in general.
What do we think the future is going to looks like?
"I need a caching component in my stack. Oh, I just let AI create it from scratch, so AI can also run it, maintain it etc."
or
"I need a caching component in my stack. Oh, let me just grab an existing, well maintained and supported cache component and let AI write the glue logic to run it, maintain it etc."
Personally I think it will be the second one. There definitely is a case for generating one off tools but I don't think AI will replace established, well written and maintained software (being it open-source or not).
Not all software is equal. I can get 80% of my new SaaS to be generated by AI as it's mostly considered boilerplate and mostly the same as any other SaaS. It's the 20% that makes it unique OR something that AI can't touch like a special relationship with a supplier or a first to market position etc.
But I use open source software because I can see and alter what's running. When you do this in a community of other developers, even as a user, you get a lot of stuff for free. I write FOSS software because I want to use it. I know the economics require give and take.
Yes, LLMs are all take. Yes, they bastardise the licenses and abuse the model. But they don't change why I want to use open source software. They don't change the fact that people need to keep writing it to keep receiving it.
Long story short, I think a lot fewer people are going to use Marc's software. He might be okay with the commercial realities of this (it might be a runaway success) but I think as non-developers get more acquainted with LLMs, being able to ask a bot to change how your system works is going to be more popular, not less, even if it's not the model RMS wanted.
I don't mean to trivialize the OP's experience. This is definitely a very important matter and serious issue in the industry. So forgive me for raising a much smaller, side point.
> I've contributed millions of lines of carefully written OSS code over the past decade
I have never tracked my own output, but I would be surprised if I have written even a single million lines of code, let alone several.
Out of curiosity, is this common? Have people here actually written millions of lines of code themselves? Even assuming two million lines over thirty years, that still averages to around 180 lines per day, every day. It is doable but it is a very high level of sustained output.
I am not doubting the OP. Just noting that this represents an extraordinary amount of coding by any measure.
Also I find it interesting describing it carefully written. To me that most likely would indicate something that has been reviewed, rewritten and reconsidered multiple times. Thus bringing down the total number of lines. As there would be significant time spend on same lines.
Or would anyone disagree that carefully written code takes more time and in the end probably results lot less lines produced in total?
Might be true, might not be true. Don't make the mistake of comparing lines of code with quality and usefulness of programs. I'm not saying you do, but don't even entertain that thought. ;)
I have worked in the industry for a little over 20 years, i wouldn't be surprised if I have written between one to two million loc.
I would be surprised if it's significantly above that.
I've been coding for 20 years and I don't think come close personally.
Some napkin math: 100-200 python scripts (maybe 250 lines on average)
Work within 10 or so large repositories. (Probably no more than 5000 lines in any repo) (maybe 750 lines on average)
20 or so hobby project games largest being around 30,000 lines (maybe average around 6000?)
15 websites with back-ends (maybe average around 2000 lines)
50 or so school projects (maybe 100 lines on average?)
Two work projects one a games website around 15,000 and the other a .Net application around 20,000
Looks like around 235,000
It's almost like the kind of extra filler that an LLM adds because it doesn't understand the meaning behind the words...
I've never thought of open source as something you can make money on directly. It's hard to see how it benefits an IC economically, besides getting some recognition and a sense of pride.
Open source has always felt explicitly like a benefit for companies.
- They get free code, buy vs build is irrelevant when you can just pip install.
- Systems become largely homogenized, thus contributors are replaceable.
- They get an established pool of workers who know the technology already, no training required.
- They get free labor from contributors outside their organization maintaining their dependencies for them in perpetuity.
It's a great deal for employers! Especially if they forbid their employees from contributing back! If you work out the game theory, there's literally no reason for a company to do anything but sit back and siphon the benefits for themselves.
This doesn't really change with LLMs, it just makes the end game much more explicit. The goal was always to capture the intellectual output of open source contributors for private profit. Always. Now that it's actually happening, who's really shocked?
> when you can just pip install.
To add: This is okay in early organizations. In larger organizations, the risk of malicious code entering your systems is much greater. So I think FOSS benefits small companies more than large companies, which seems good.
While the observations might be true, I’m not sure going closed source is going to help here. If optimizing docs for AI makes you less visible, guess what else makes you less visible : not even being accessible.
Just because AI is "taking advantage" of projects being open source doesn’t mean the solution is direct closed source. Going with the most direct solution to a problem is an indication you might not have spent time thinking deeper about the problem
My OSS project wasn’t nearly as well used, but it also was making someone else money, and I also put a lot of time into it without getting paid.
I never had the time or understanding to setup a business around it, so in the end I just got rid of everything. No more open source unless it’s purely for my own enjoyment.
I’m VERY appreciative of free and open source projects and organizations that don’t try to make money. The FSF, GNU, Linux- I love these! I would love if the world just focused on these! I would use a Linux desktop and phone if they were in that Apple sweetspot (iOS 26 not included) of ease for techs and non-techs.
What I’ve noticed about successful open-source projects is that they have:
- a strong leader, who has dedicated their life to it, not as a secondary initiative, and who one day knows they must hand the reins to another
- a willing team that continues to bring in “new meat”
- a project that sells itself by filling a need that will remain for some time by many
- no need or desire for money
Those that end in failure involve:
- a leader/team that sees it as part-time volunteer work, and they do it because it makes them feel good about themselves; they are giving back
- the assumption that one day maybe they’ll get paid
Monetizing open source never made sense for me. Mostly because I operate from selfish viewpoint. Why would I pay for something that is provided for free? It is starting to seem like I was right. You have to fund it from selling a product. Or be one of the few that are valuable enough to be paid for running it. But those are exceedingly rare in total population and don't make scalable business model.
Like he said a lot of OSS works on tiered features, most is free, premium at a premium.
But the main issue is that doesn't work anymore if LLMs have been trained entirely on the free and can generate the premium with ease.
> generate the premium with ease
I don’t think this will be possible for many open core projects. Often the premium features are the more complex and difficult ones. If you could generate those you don’t need the project at all anymore you can just generate the whole thing. Of course that is the wet dream of VCs and would make programmers completely obsolete but I don’t think it’s realistic (at least not anytime soon)
Part of me says that that could be handled with licenses, though for that to work the code probably no longer qualifies as open source either.
Also, I'd guess, the sort of people who are comfortable with asking an LLM to build the premium features are, uh, morally flexible enough to not care about licenses in the first place.
> You have to fund it from selling a product.
Well, no. Most people in the world get paid for doing a thing. I pay someone $X and they do Y for me and then I have the Y that I wanted done.
This can work for software too. Someone pays me to develop software that does something useful for them, and then they have the thing they wanted. For example if Wine is missing a feature someone can pay me to implement it, and then everyone involved is happy.
I agree it's a more challenging business model, but it does work.
Money must come from somewhere. And by selling a product I mean a phone. Or box doing something. With Wine, well Valve sells games and want those games to run on something else than platform they were build for.
In the end product is being sold originally to fund that development. Software can also be pure product enabling company to do something or consumer to do something. But in that case open-source is likely incidental. Not the product.
In your first comment you said, "why would I pay for [software] if it is provided for free?" And you're right, you don't. What you pay for is for someone to develop software/features that don't exist yet. Maybe the users of the phone you sell want some new feature. Then it's done and everyone's happy and even better you don't need to pay for the entire project to be built from scratch or pay ongoing license fees or whatever. That's how you monetize open source.
What are some examples of big OSS projects that work with this model? Aka “pay us to get feature X?”
It sounds to me that this would invite an insane level of bloat and one-off features.
Igalia, Collabora, Red Hat, GCC, LLVM, Wine, the entire Linux kernel. Tons of open source consulting companies out there working on all kinds of projects.
It's almost always locking some features behind subscription.
Obviously, SSO is the best choice for most deployments. Enterprises (who will probably pay the most) will require SSO.
Open Source is the "free taste". Everyone knows, uses, and likes Grafana. When your company is looking for something, you'll recommend it because you're familiar with it. Your company will want things like SCIM or similar, and pay them for it.
It's harder for products that are trying to sell to smaller companies/individuals, but it still applies.
It's an incredibly complex topic, and I do feel for people who are now seeing a massive disruption to the existing ways to monetise their own work (they should be able to live comfortably).
It's quite ironic that they used an LLM to write or at least entirely re-format their post, when their topic is about the impact these systems have on the ongoing sustainability of the humans behind the work.
I personally don't use LLMs and generative models, I find their output way too untrustworthy and their practice of mining the data of others unsettling. Not that anything on the internet can be inherently trusted anyway.
> My prediction: a new marketplace emerges, built for agents… Libraries become APIs with meters.
So… SaaS and how every cloud provider already monetizes open-source code?
It also seems like a weird prediction when agents make reproducing the API from a spec easier and easier. If an API is accessible, you can point your coding agent at it to refine a spec and local test suite.
You'd expect libraries-as-API (libraries that's previously be offered in code form but where people try to limit code access by offering it only as an API, as opposed to SaaS's where the API provided access to a larger system, gatekept data, or running infrastructure) to get incredibly hard to monetize too, unless they're extremely complex.
Bye Marc - please stay in the proprietary world too. Others will do the open source development from this point on.
What a way to boast about yourself
>If you want to use my libraries (1M+ downloads/month) in the future, you have to pay.
Problem with this is demand like that can vanish once you paygate it.
Even more relevant is the rationale behind it.
Unless your closed source code will be usable by llms more effectively then what's available today in oss, it's likely going to die off within the next decade or two.
There will continue to be a need for software developers for the foreseeable future, but the market will continue to trend toward more and more LLM generated code - no matter how this is seen by us developers.
Yes, well, none of your code will be used by me from now on so we're even. So long and thanks for all the fish.
Frustratingly, while I sympathize with their very real plight, I also have to agree with OP’s ultimate decision.
OSS was exploited by hyperscalers to build trillion-dollar industries atop of, but without ever suitably compensating, the creators of much of those tools for their work or sharing in the profit. Before AI, the community was already at a breaking point between private enterprise spouting “supply chain” bullshit at them to demand fixes and attention, or steamrolled small devs to prop up a big corp’s trademark or product, all the while never actually paying enough for the proper development and support of those products - look at NPM (leftpad and kik) as prime examples. Now you have these same big tech ghouls scraping small sites into oblivion with hostile bots, making token predictors that are deliberately engineered to never, ever direct someone to a primary source or site except as an absolute last resort (to keep folks “in app” for engagement metrics), and openly pitching AI coding agents as replacements for human coders forever.
In that context, it’s no fucking wonder that the OSS community is becoming increasingly hostile to the very norms that have left most of them broke and increasingly destitute. Hell, for up-and-coming devs emerging from bootcamps, the mantra of “contribute to OSS” makes zero sense in a Capitalist marketplace that’s pivoting hard towards AI-as-human-replacement; as the OP points out, why bother training your own replacement?
OSS won’t die, but this is a particularly painful chapter that emphasizes it cannot support itself through the (non-existent) generosity of Capital. Alternate funding schemes and organization models are needed to prepare and support it for the future, be they government grants, Academia sponsors, or outright Gov-funded Private or Public Corporations (e.g., BBC, Corporation for Public Broadcasting (RIP), etc). Updates to OSS licensing schemes barring use-cases or with more substantial teeth for commercial use are also needed, toeing the line between empowering users of general computing and extracting reasonable payments from businesses or enterprises.
Luddite: We need to destroy these mechanical looms that are taking all our jobs leaving us homeless and hungry
Marx: Did it occurred to you to destroy the system that make robots doing your job a bad thing?
And both of them failed.
Both the machines and "the system" are alive and well. Did it occurred to you that you're using machines (computers, internet, HN) created by the system to complain about the system?
The bitter truth is that we don't have any good alternative for both the machines and "the system".
For Luddites' and Marxists' chagrin, manual weaving was indeed a crappy job and "the system" brought what they'd call "advance in the means of production".
It is honestly depressing how many people have swallowed the capitalist pill so completely. Most people can't even fathom a world where cooperation actually works better than a cutthroat rat race.
It leads to these total room-temperature takes that the system is the only reason we have the internet or Hacker News. It is exhausting watching people parrot the same old clichés because they are too lazy to actually crack a history book.
The truth is that foundational tech was almost never market-driven. The architecture of the computer, the internet, and the Web were all products of the public commons. They were created by people motivated by discovery and utility rather than exit liquidity. Capital did not invent these things. It just showed up late, threw a fence around them, and started charging rent on human ingenuity it had nothing to do with.
Same goes for the Luddites. They were not anti-machine, they were just anti-starvation. They did not hate the loom. They hated that the loom was being used as a legal weapon to gut their labor rights while the owners hoarded 100 percent of the gains.
Using a computer to call this out is not hypocrisy. It is using a tool that was stolen from the human commons to argue for its return. If you think we owe our progress to the current ownership model, you are not paying attention. You have just been programmed by the marketing.
Hell, the whole idea of open-source on which the entire modern tech world is based upon, which the Internet and Hacker News itself thrived upon, is completely antithetical to capitalism.
The cambrian explosion of tech exists because someone decided to give intellectual property away for free.
I agree with you. My hope and dream is that society is able to move on not by regressing to Luddism, but by restoring technology's position to service the people, as a tool for making life better, rather than to mould, measure and control humanity. Remember the sad meme that the brightest minds of our generations are thinking about how to make people click on ads. It is tragic.
Whether you think it possible or not, this take misunderstands Marxism at a fundamental level.
For Marxists, automation is a good thing - in fact it is a core precondition of socialism.
Marx spent half the first chapter of the Communist Manifesto fanboying over capitalism for the productivity increases brought by capitalism.
So why do you think it was to the chagrin of Marxists? Marx spent decades cheering on the advancement of industrialisation, and specifically argued (in The German Ideology) that socialism would be impossible without these advances in productive forces.
Fair enough: the Chinese Marxists seem to love their robots, a lot.
But, also, they handle all that automation to the capitalists. Because capitalists are simply much better at doing it.
So it seems that, even when it succeeds, socialism can't really get rid of "the system", after all.
The CCP isn't Marxist and doesn't claim to be.
Deng basically copied parts of Lenins "New Economic Policy" of "limited capitalism" because he like Lenin realised they'd made a mistake in preempting dismantling of the market, in direct contradiction of the Marxist view that a socialist revolution requires a well developed capitalist economy, and Marx explicit warning against attempting socialism too soon. That's what I pointed to with the reference to the German Ideology. Because of course taking out profit enough to do meaningful redistribution will harm growth. That's not a "gotcha" - it's an inherent, core assumption of Marxist thinking that socialism only becomes possible because of capitalism.
> The CCP isn't Marxist and doesn't claim to be.
This is just adorable!
May I assume that the Cuban, North Korean, Laos and Vietnamese Communist parties aren't Marxist also? Naturally, same goes to former USSR, Khmer Rouge, etc
You are conflating Marxism with China, which is just a state-capitalist powerhouse using the exact same model of enclosure and rent-seeking we are arguing against. China doesn't "hand over" automation because capitalists are better at it; the state simply socializes the risk and R&D before letting private proxies handle the commercialization. Citing a state-backed monopoly system to prove "the market" is the only way to build tech is total nonsense.
The marxists got the first man in space while urbanizing (a decimated by WWII) population of serfs without favelas and slums. If that is a "fail", what would you call the 'wonders' brought by the last 30 yrs without them?
The essence of free software is and always has been charity. Some people attempt to interface with capitalism via "open source" but that game is rigged to make previous winners continue to win so you missed the boat. It's a mistake to link coding to how you get food, shelter, safety, etc. Do it for fun or not at all.
Tailwind makes more money than ever through donation, but that isn't a business. It's the tailwind proprietary themes that wasn't doing well. It's just bad to say tailwind is losing because of AI.
Tailwind being funded is evidence to me that there’s still far too much money in making software compared to the rest of society, not too little as the author would like us to think.
> Look at Tailwind: 75 million downloads/month, more popular than ever, revenue down 80%, docs traffic down 40%, 75% of engineering team laid off. Someone submitted a PR to add LLM-optimized docs and Wathan had to decline - optimizing for agents accelerates his business's death. He's being asked to build the infrastructure for his own obsolescence.
So what are the actual solutions, now that the cat is out of the bag?
Much like in the post, you could make it source available and have a free license for non-profits and development, but ask money for commercial usage, or different feature sets (like iframe-resizer, which we recently bought for a project, saved a bunch of time, but the AI models still were trained on it and knew how to use it). Or provide support, like many FOSS DBs and OSes should, same for libraries, maybe to have PostgreSQL dethrone Oracle and the likes just a little bit more.
Or maybe some ask-for-funding stuff defined at library level with the expectation that the AIs would present this information to whoever uses them. I don't particularly celebrate https://docs.npmjs.com/cli/v9/commands/npm-fund but I get why it's there - similarly we might get IDE plugins and CLI tools and such to present a summary of what libraries or projects were used/suggested in a task/chat session and how to give them money, much like how you'd get references to website sources when trying to ask AI to research something.
> My prediction: a new marketplace emerges, built for agents. Want your agent to use Tailwind? Prisma? Pay per access.
This probably already exists in the form of MCP solutions for up to date documentation for specific libraries and so on, to mitigate hallucinations.
Either way, we need to start implementing actual solutions so we don't keep ending up with https://staltz.com/software-below-the-poverty-line.html all the time. And not just some "human contract" approach of expecting that someone will go to your docs manually and see the banner that they can give you money for more bells and whistles or something. To me, that feels like wishful thinking.
AI or not, people's work should be rewarded and that needs some sort of standardization - and I hold that view even in regards to answering feature requests on GitHub, like if someone demands something, they should immediately have the option to place money into an escrow for when/if a solution is presented to them (or get the money back if not). If they don't, you have no obligation to help them unless from the goodness of your own heart and the innate desire to do so. Similarly, if I use 10 libraries, I should be able to say "Okay I have 50 bucks, I want to donate to all of these projects by executing a single npm command and confirming a PayPal payment or something."
Incidentally, that's also the first step towards building the Torment Nexus (capitalist incentives will find a way to turn this into a hellscape), but go figure.
This is pissing into the wind because in, the long run, AI will write the functionality it wanted to use instead because there are no magic or special libraries. Furthermore, it will eventually (over a long enough timescale) eat deeper down the stack by writing programming languages (with most incomprehensible to humans*), designing chips, designing systems, deploying code, planning datacenters, and designing products... this the manifestation of a gradual technological "singularity".
* This is how billionaire techbros will finally push most humans out of tech.
All they're doing now by putting up roadblocks is collectively punishing humans from competing with AI.
On the other side of the token, don't give away things and expect payment. Give things away because it's cool, not as a primary survival strategy based on mythological expectations of gratuity. It comes across as bitter giver's remorse. And unprofessional poison spewed onto social media also wrecks their professional reputation and drives customers away.
TLDR: author only sees OSS as a sort of marketing funnel for paid tiers and business fame
Tailwind is down because it solved the same problem that AI does - CSS is super complex, write only code and largely not memorable.
AI is perfect for writing CSS because you can tell it your intent and it does it.
There just is not the need for frameworks/libs to make it less complex.
I have just written an article about this (submitted by someone else: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46565409)
What you are saying is wrong and countered with hard data: LLMs produce and increase the use of tailwind not decrease it. Confirmed by the founder himself.
Where is the hard data?
And you think LLMs can't produce tailwind components? Because that's the problem they are facing, not tailwind usage itself.