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.
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)...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Github the website however is.
You don't need to replace git.
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...
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.
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
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 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
> 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.
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
Including all those other excluded things, I could see a million per decade across all languages and personal/work projects pretty easily for myself.
Or would anyone disagree that carefully written code takes more time and in the end probably results lot less lines produced in total?
I would be surprised if it's significantly above that.
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
So… SaaS and how every cloud provider already monetizes open-source code?
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
It sounds to me that this would invite an insane level of bloat and one-off features.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
I don't believe it is possible to "carefully" write thousands of lines of code every single day.
Problem with this is demand like that can vanish once you paygate 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.
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.
* 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.
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.
Marx: Did it occurred to you to destroy the system that make robots doing your job a bad thing?
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
