The Pincer Attack – How AI Killed Open Source (opens in new tab)

(linuxtoaster.com)

3 pointsdirk940181mo ago7 comments

7 comments

Author here. I run LinuxToaster, a set of commercial Unix tools for the AI era. This started as notes after watching the LiteLLM compromise unfold in real time — 94 million monthly downloads, credential stealer active for three hours, maintainer's GitHub issue closed as "not planned." Same week Cloudflare showed one engineer could clone Next.js in a week for $1,100 in inference costs. The thesis: the economics that created open source have inverted. Production used to be expensive and trust was free. Now production is nearly free and trust is the expensive part. Open source is getting hit from every direction — supply chain attacks are cheaper to execute than to detect, corporations clone instead of contribute, and individual devs yoink the three functions they need instead of installing the package. Happy to discuss. I know this is a spicy take for HN.

gnabgib1mo ago

You're over-doing the self promotion. Perhaps you could read the guidelines, specifically:

> Please don't use HN primarily for promotion. It's ok to post your own stuff part of the time, but the primary use of the site should be for curiosity.

And share something you're curious about.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

dirk94018OP1mo ago

Fair point. The article doesn't mention LinuxToaster's products — the curiosity here is about the future of open source, not promotion. For what it's worth, toastd does what LiteLLM does in C with no Python supply chain, which is part of what got me thinking about this topic in the first place. But that's not in the post.

gnabgib1mo ago

Does this part -at the bottom of your article- not count?

> LinuxToaster is a set of Unix tools re-imagined for the AI era. From toast — sed with a brain — to ito, version control built for AI, to squawk, a messaging bus for AI and humans.

1 more reply

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7 comments

dirk94018OP1mo ago

gnabgib1mo ago

You're over-doing the self promotion. Perhaps you could read the guidelines, specifically:

> Please don't use HN primarily for promotion. It's ok to post your own stuff part of the time, but the primary use of the site should be for curiosity.

And share something you're curious about.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

dirk94018OP1mo ago

gnabgib1mo ago

Does this part -at the bottom of your article- not count?

> LinuxToaster is a set of Unix tools re-imagined for the AI era. From toast — sed with a brain — to ito, version control built for AI, to squawk, a messaging bus for AI and humans.

1 more reply

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse