The thing that leaves a bad taste in my mouth is the fact that my works were likely included in the training data and, if it doesn't violate my licenses (GNU 2/3), it certainly feels against the spirit of what I intended when distributing my works.
I was made redundant recently "due to AI" (questionable) and it feels like my works in some way contributed to my redundancy where my works contributed to the profits made by these AI megacorps while I am left a victim.
I wish I could be provided a dividend or royalty, however small, for my contribution to these LLMs but that will never happen.
I've been looking for a copy-left "source available" license that allows me to distribute code openly but has a clause that says "if you would like to use these sources to train an LLM, please contact me and we'll work something out". I haven't yet found that.
I'm guessing that such a license would not be enforceable because I am not in the US, but at least it would be nice to declare my intent and who knows what the future looks like.
And who was it who benefited from this stuff? A lot of the benefit went to "megacorps" who took the savings and banked the higher profits.
So I don't think open source, which for many years was unashamedly about just cloning designs that were funding other people's salaries, can really cry too much about LLMs. And I say that as someone who has written a lot of open source software, including working on Wine.
Why do you think "fair use" doesn't apply in this case? The prior Bartz vs Anthropic ruling laid out pretty clearly how training an AI model falls within the realm of fair use. Authors Guild vs Google and Authors Guild vs HathiTrust were both decided much earlier and both found that digitizing copyrighted works for the sake of making them searchable is sufficiently transformative to meet the standards of fair use. So what is it about GPL licensed software that you feel would make AI training on it not subject to the same copyright and fair use considerations that apply to books?
Are you saying that you believe that untested but technically; models trained on GPL sources need to distribute the resulting LLMs under GPL?
Or, in the case of LLMs, recklessly swing about software they don't understand while praying to find a business model.
What makes it all tricky for the courts is there's not a good way to really identify what part the generated code is a derivative of (except in maybe some extreme examples).
I think anyone here can understand and even share that feeling. And I agree with your "questionable" - its just the lame HR excuse du jour.
My 2c:
- AI megacorps aren't the only ones gaining, we all are. the leverage you have to build and ship today is higher than it was five years ago.
- It feels like megacorps own the keys right now, but that’s a temporary. In a world of autonomous agents and open-weight models, control is decentralized.inference costs continue to drop, you dont need to be running on megacorp stacks. Millions (billions?) of agents finding and sharing among themselves. How will megacorps stop?
- I see the advent of LLMs like the spread of literacy. Scribes once held a monopoly on the written word, which felt like a "loss" to them when reading/writing became universal. But today, language belongs to everyone. We aren't losing code; we are making the ability to code a universal human "literacy."
No, no we are not.
> the leverage you have to build and ship today is higher than it was five years ago.
I don’t want more “leverage to build and ship”, I want to live in a world where people aren’t so disconnected from reality and so lonely they have romantic relationships with a chat window; where they don’t turn off their brains and accept any wrong information because it comes from a machine; where propaganda, mass manipulation, and surveillance aren’t at the ready hands of any two-bit despot; where people aren’t so myopic that they only look at their own belly button and use case for a tool that they are incapable of recognising all the societal harms around them.
> We aren't losing code; we are making the ability to code a universal human "literacy."
No, no we are not. What we are, however, is making ever increasingly bad comparisons.
Literacy implies understanding. To be able to read and write, you need to be able to understand how to do both. LLMs just spit text which you don’t need to understand at all, and increasingly people are not even caring to try to understand it. LLM generated code in the hands of someone who doesn’t read it is the opposite of literacy.
I’m not a professionally trained SWE (I’m a scientist who does engineering work). LLMs have really accelerated my ability to build, ideate, and understand systems in a way that I could only loosely gain from sometimes grumpy but mostly kind senior engineers in overcrowded chat rooms.
The legality of all of this is dubious, though, per the parent. I GPL licensed my FOSS scientific software because I wanted it to help advance biomedical research. Not because I wanted it to help a big corp get rich.
But then again, maybe code like mine is what is holding these models back lol.
The same way that doordash makes kitchen skills universal.
Remains to be seen. Hardware prices are increasing. Manufacturers are abandoning the consumer sector to serve the all consuming AI demands. Not to mention the constant attempts to lock down the computers so that we don't own them.
What does the future hold for us? Unknown. It's not looking too good though. What good is hardware if we're priced out? What good are open models and free software if we're unable to run them?
Literacy require training though. It’s not the same to be able to make voice rendition of a text, understand what the text is about, have a critical analysis toolbox of texts, and having the habit to lookup for situated within a broader inferred context.
Just throwing LLMs into people hands won’t automatically make them able to use it in relevant manner as far as global social benefits can be considered.
The literacy issue is actually quite independent of the fact that LLMs used are distributed or centralised.
LLMs making the ability to code a universal human “literacy” is like saying that Markov chain is making the ability to write a universal human “literacy”.
If anything, in Extremistan we're all useless. Platforms and whales are all that matters.
Wake me up when you do.
His work is available with a permissible license on the Internet but somehow it doesn't seem right that a tool will just regurgitate someone else's work without any mention of copyright or license or original authorship.
Pre-LLM world one would at least have had to search for this information, find the site, understand the license and acknowledge who the author is. Post LLM the tool will just blatantly plagiarize someone else work which you can then sign off on as your own. Disgusting.
Are they? A lot of these were used by people >20 years before Inigo wrote his blog posts. I wrote RenderMan shaders for VFX in the 90's professionally; you think about the problem, you "discover" (?) the math.
So they were known because they were known (a lot of them are also trivial).
Inio's main credit is for cataloging them, especially the 3D ones, and making this knowledge available in one place, excellently presented.
And of course, Shadertoy and the community and giving this knowledge a stage to play out in that way. I would say no one deserves more credit for getting people hooked on shader writing and proceduralism in rendering than this man.
But I would not feel bad about the math being regurgiated by an LLM.
There were very few people writing shaders (mostly for VFX, in RenderMan SL) in the 90's and after.
So apart from the "Texturing and Modeling -- A Procedural Approach" book, the "The RenderMan Companion" and "Advanced RenderMan", there was no literature. The GPU Gems series closed some gaps in later years.
The RenderMan Repository website was what had shader source and all pattern stuff was implict (what we call 2D SDFs today) beause of the REYES architecture of the renderers.
But knowledge about using SDFs in shaders mostly lived in people's heads. Whoever would write about it online would thus get quoted by an LLM.
BAM, the LLM just strips all that out, basically pretending it just conjured an elegant solution from the thin air.
No wonder some people started calling the current generation of "AI" plagiarism machines - it really seems more fitting by the day.
So in my view, if you treat an LLM as a tool for retrieving knowledge or solutions, there isn't really a problem here. And honestly, the line between "knowledge" and "creation" can be quite blurry. For example, when you use Newton's Second Law (F = ma), you don't explicitly state that it comes from Isaac Newton every time—but that doesn't mean you're not respecting his contribution.
These don't contradict each other though, you could "blatantly plagiarize someone else work" before as well. LLMs just add another layer in between.
Afterward, they'd got Rudy's foreman to let him off, and, in a boisterous, whimsical spirit of industrial democracy, they'd taken him across the street for a beer. Rudy hadn't understood quite what the recording instruments were all about, but what he had understood, he'd liked: that he, out of thousands of machinists, had been chosen to have his motions immortalized on tape. And here, now, this little loop in the box before Paul, here was Rudy as Rudy had been to his machine that afternoon - Rudy, the turner-on of power, the setter of speeds, the controller of the cutting tool. This was the essence of Rudy as far as his machine was concerned, as far as the economy was concerned, as far as the war effort had been concerned. The tape was the essence distilled from the small, polite man with the big hands and black fingernails; from the man who thought the world could be saved if everyone read a verse from the Bible every night; from the man who adored a collie for want of children; from the man who . . . What else had Rudy said that afternoon? Paul supposed the old man was dead now - or in his second childhood in Homestead.
Now, by switching in lathes on a master panel and feeding them signals from the tape, Paul could make the essence of Rudy Hertz produce one, ten, a hundred, or a thousand of the shafts.
Kurt Vonnegut, Player Piano
But I hope this same 'fair use' will allow distilling of their private models into open weight models, so users are never locked in into any particular vendor. Giving back power to the user.
Personally, I want a viral (GPL-style) license that explicitly prohibits use of code for LLM training/tuning purposes — with the asterisk that while current law might view LLM training as fair use, this may not be the case forever, and blatant disregard of the terms of the license should make it easier for me to sue offenders in the future.
Alternatively, this could be expressed as: the output of any LLM trained on this code must retain this license.
You can own the works, but not the vibes. If everyone owned the vibes we would all be infringing others. In my view abstractions should not be protected by copyright, only expression, currently the abstraction-filtration-comparison standard (AFC) protects abstractions too, non-literal infringement is a thing.
Trying to own the vibes is like trying to own the functionality itself, no matter the distinct implementation details, and this is closer to patents than copyrights. But patents get researched for prior art and have limited duration, copyright is automatic and almost infinite duration.
It’s a wild thought to think that of all the things that will remain on this earth after you’re gone, it’ll be your GPL contributions reconstituting themselves as an LLM’s hallucinations.
There are also people who want to be eaten by a literal cannibal. I say, no thanks.
The c is for code. If adopted we could spend forever arguing how the c is pronounced and whether the original had a cedilla, circonflex or rhymes with bollocks, which seems somehow appropriate. Everyone uses xene instead. x is chi but most people don't notice.
I realize this is an unpopular opinion on HN, but I believe it is best because it's a weakener interpretation of copyright law, which is overall a good thing in my view.
This is increasingly common, and I don’t think it’s questionable that LLMs that software engineers help train are contributing to the obsolescence of software engineers. Large companies that operate these LLMs both 1) benefit from the huge amount of open-source software and at the same time 2) erode the very foundation that made open-source software explode in popularity (which happened thanks to copyright—or, more precisely, the ability to use copyright to enforce copyleft and thus protect the future of volunteer work made by individual contributors).
GPL was written long before this technology started to be used this way. There’s little doubt that the spirit of GPL is violated at scale by commercial LLM operators, and considering the amount of money that got sunk into this it’s very unlikely they would ever yield to the public the models, the ability to mass-scrape the entire Internet to train equivalent models, the capability to run these models to obtain comparable results, etc. The claim of “democratising knowledge” is disingenuous if you look deeper into it—somehow, they themselves will always be exempt from that democratisation and free to profit from our work, whereas our work is what gets “democratised”. Somehow, this strikes me personally more as expropriation than democratisation.
Frankly do you think AI companies have even the remotest amount of respect for these licenses anyways? They will simply take your code if it is publicly scrapeable, train their models, exactly like they have so far. Then it will be up to you to chase them down and try to sue or whatever. And good luck proving the license violation
I dunno. I just don't really believe that many tech companies these days are behaving even remotely ethically. I don't have much hope that will change anytime soon
Take a litigious company like Nintendo. If one was to train an LLM on their works and the LLM produces an emulator, that would force a lawsuit.
If Nintendo wins, then LLMs are stealing. If Nintendo loses, then we can decompile everything.
If my license explicitly says "any LLM output trained on this code is legally tainted," I feel like BigAICorp would be foolish to ignore it. Maybe I couldn't sue them today, but are they confident this will remain the case 5, 10, 20 years from now? Everywhere in the world?
If trendlines continue... It will be faster for AI to vibe code said software to your customized specifications than to sign up for a SaaS and learn it.
"Claude, create a project management tool that simplifies jira, customize it to my workflow."
So a lot of apps will actually become closed source personalized builds.
I can already build a ticket tracker in a weekend. I’ve been on many teams that used Jira, nobody loves Jira, none of us ever bothered to DIY something good enough.
Why?
Because it’s a massive distraction. It’s really fun to build all these side apps, but then you have to maintain them.
I’m guessing a lot of vibeware will be abandoned rather than maintained.
There is a reason why large proprietary products remain prevalent even when cheaper better alternatives exist. Being "industry standard" matters more than being the best.
I've always preferred my stack to be on the thinner, more vanilla, less prebuilt side than others around me, and seems like LLMs are reinforcing that approach now.
Trendlines will continue. Even the one for greenhouse gases. That is the most realistic scenario. In fact the trendline for greenhouse gases is even stronger than AI. I am far more confident about greenhouse gases continuing to rise than I am for AI.
Telling me how another trendline points to a shitty reality doesn't change the fact that the shitty reality is still reality. It's a common mistake in debate.
I haven't stated whether I hope for one reality or the other. I'm simply stating the most probable future. You haven't even disagreed with me.
Like all code-generators that came before, the current LLM will end up a niche product after the hype-cycle ends. "AI" only works if the models are fed other peoples real works, and the web is already >52% nonsense now. They add the Claude-contributor/flag to Git projects, so the scrapers don't consume as much of its own slop. ymmv =3
All the infrastructure that runs the whole AI-over-the-internet juggernaut is essentially all open source.
Heck, even Claude Code would be far less useful without grep, diff, git, head, etc., etc., etc. And one can easily see a day where something like a local sort Claude Code talking to Open Weight and Open Source models is the core dev tool.
Exactly.
> Heck, even Claude Code would be far less useful without grep, diff, git, head, etc.
It wouldn't even work. It's constantly using those.
I remember reading a Claude Code CLI install doc and the first thing was "we need ripgrep" with zero shame.
All these tools also all basically run on top of Linux: with Claude Code actually installing, on Windows and MacOS, a full linux VM on the system.
It's all open-source command line tools, an open-source OS and piping program one to the other. I'm on Linux on the desktop (and servers ofc) since the Slackware days... And I was right all along.
Without the ability to string together the basic utilities into a much greater sum, Unix would have been another blip.
But the Libre part of Free Software has never mattered less, at least so TFA argues and while I could niggle with the point, it's not wrong.
1. they were trained on FLOSS repositories without consent of the authors, including GPL and AGPL repos
2. the best models are proprietary
3. folks making low-effort contribution attempts using AI (PRs, security reports, etc).
I agree those are legitimate problems but LLMs are the new reality, they are not going to go away. Much more powerful lobbies than the OSS ones are losing fights against the LLM companies (the big copyright holders in media).
But while companies can use LLMs to build replacements for GPL licensed code (where those LLMs have that GPL code probably in their training set), the reverse thing can also be done: one can break monopolies open using LLMs, and build so much open source software using LLMs.
In the end, the GPL is only a means to an end.
That's the conventional wisdom, but it isn't a given. A lot of financial wizardry is taking place to prop up the best of these things, and even their most ardent proponents are starting to recognize their futility once a certain complexity level is reached. The open weight models are the stalking horse that gives this proposition the most legs, but it's not given that Anthropic and OpenAI exist as anything more than shells of their current selves in 5 years.
Meanwhile as people sleep on LLMs to help them audit their code for security holes, or even any security code auditing tools. Script kiddies don't care that you think AI isn't ready, they'll use AI models to scrape your website for security gaps. They'll use LLMs to figure out how to hack your employees and steal your data. We already saw that hackers broke into government servers for the Mexican government, basically scraping every document of every Mexican citizen. Now is the time to start investing in security auditing, before you become the next news headline.
AI isn't the future, it's already here, and hackers will use it against you.
Let me know when you succeed.
> the GPL is only a means to an end
And how this end is closer with LLMs?
The blog post of this thread argues that now, even average users have the ability to modify GPL'd code thanks to LLMs. The bigger advantage though is that one can use it to break open software monopolies in the first place.
A lot of such monopolies are based on proprietary formats.
If LLM swarms can build a browser (not from scratch) and C compiler (from scratch), they can also build an LLVM backend for a bespoke architecture that only has a proprietary C compiler for it. They can also build adobe software replacements, pdf editors, debug/fix linux driver issues, etc.
$20/month with your provider of choice unlocks a lot.
Edit: the underlying point being, yes to the article. Either building upon the foundations of open source to making personal things, or just modifying a fork for my own needs.
This was _incredibly_ hard to set up, in a way I did not expect, even with frontier models. It took me 3-4 evenings.
If someone can solve "Heroku for home server" it would open up a world of what HackerNews calls "home cooked" software.
The benefits to publishing AI generated code as open source are immense including code hosting and CI/CD pipelines for build, test, lint, security scans, etc. In additional to CI/CD pipelines, my repos have commits authored by Claude, Dependabot, GitHub Advanced Security Bot, Copilot, etc. All of this makes the code more reliable and maintainable, for both human and AI authored code.
Some thoughts on two recent posts:
1. 90% of Claude-linked output going to GitHub repos w <2 stars (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47521157): I'm generally too busy to publishing code to promote, but at some time it might settle down. Additionally, with how fast AI can generate and refactor code, it can take some time before the code is stable enough to promote.
2. So where are all the AI apps? (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47503006): They are in GitHub with <2 stars! They are there but without promotion it takes a while to get started in popularity. That being said, I'm starting to get some PRs.
It is completely delusional that these copied "works" will have any effect or be used by anyone but the most rabid AI proponents just to make a point.
Stars will likely go up over time, but more than the stars it's the testing and maintenance over time that's valuable. There's little promotion right now, but there are already some stars, PRs, and issues. In fact, I'm working on merging PRs now.
Unless you're using an enterprise license that indemnifies your liabilities, you're almost certainly breaking copyright law and your packages are unusable by any serious company as a dependency. Even permissive OSS licenses like MIT don't take effect since they're predicated on the author actually holding a valid copyright (which you don't if AI agents have committed to your repo, as affirmed by USCO).
We'll almost certainly have a situation where if an open-source repo has direct AI agent commits in its history, it will be just as untouchable for companies as GPL repos.
More on the 19M+ commits here:
My belief is that Lemons effectively kill open source in the long run, and generally speaking, people forget that Free Software is even a thing. The reasoning for that is simple: it’s too easy to produce a “clean” derivative with just the parts you need. Lemons do much better with a fully Lemoned codebase than they do with a hybrid. Incentives to “rewrite” also free people from “licensing burdens” while the law is fuzzy.
I think as long as AI isn't literal AGI, social pressures will keep projects alive, in some state. There definitely is something scary about stealing entire products as a mean for new market domination - e.g. steal linux then make a corporate linux, and force everybody to contribute to corporate linux only (many linux contributors are paid by corporations, after all), and make that the new central pointer. That might be worst case scenario - then Microsoft, in collusion (which I admit is far fetched, but def possible), could completely adopt linux for servers and headless compute, and enforce very strict hardware restrictions such that only Windows works.
I suppose the idea would be, they don't have to maintain it: if it ever starts to rot from whatever environmental changes, then they can just get the LLM to patch it, or at worst, generate it again from scratch.
(And personally, I prefer writing code so that it isn't coupled so tightly to the environment or other people's fast-moving libraries to begin with, since I don't want to poke at all of my projects every other year just to keep them functional.)
The advantage of decoupling from supply chain attacks is so large that I expect this to be standard practice as soon as later this year.
FOSS came up around the core idea of liberating software for hardware, and later on was sustained by the idea of a commodity of commons we can build on. But with LLMs we have alternative pathways/enablement for the freedoms:
Freedom 0 (Run): LLMs troubleshoot environments and guide installations, making software executable for anyone.
Freedom 1 (Study/Change): make modifications, including lowering bar of technical knowledge.
Freedom 2 (Redistribute): LLMs force redistribution by building specs and reimplementing if needed.
Freedom 3 (Improve/Distribute): Everyone gets the improvement they want.
As we can see LLM makes these freedoms more democratic, beyond pure technical capability.
For those that cared only about these 4 freedoms, LLMs enable these in spades. But those who looked additionally for business, signalling and community values of free software (I include myself in this), these were not guaranteed by FOSS, and we find ourselves figuring out how to make up for these losses.
Now the software doesn't matter. The code doesn't matter. The hardware doesn't matter. Anyone can generate anything for anything, as long as they pay the fee. I think it can likely be argued that participation is now gated more than ever and will require usage of an LLM to keep up and maintain some kind of competition or even meager parity. Open weight models are not really a means of crossing the moat; none of the open weight models come close to the functionality, and all of them come from the same types of corporations that are releasing their models for unspecified reasons. The fact remains that the moat created by LLMs for open source software has never been larger.
I cringe whenever I see such an AI generated sentence and unfortunately it devalues the article
(I know this isn't the actual point of your comment, apologies!)
Copyleft licenses like GPL/Apache mandate upstream freedom: Upstream has the "freedom" to use anything downstream, including anything written by a corporation.
Non-copyleft FOSS licenses like MIT/BSD are about downstream freedom, which is more of a philosophically utilitarian view, where anyone who receives the software is free to use it however they want, including not giving their changes back to the community, on the assumption that this maximizes the utility of this free software in the world.
If you prioritize the former goal, then coding agents are a huge problem for you. If the latter, then coding agents are the best thing ever, because they give everyone access to an effectively unlimited amount of cheap code.
[1] Malus.sh ; Initially a joke but, in the end, not. You can actually pay for their service.
[2] Your new code is delivered under the MalusCorp-0 License—a proprietary-friendly license with zero attribution requirements, zero copyleft, and zero obligations.
AI is going to exploit even more: "Given the repository -> Construct tech spec -> Build project based on tech spec"
At this stage, I want everyone just close their source, stop working on open source until this issue of licensing gets resolved.
Any improvement you make to the open source code will be leveraged in ways you didn't intend it to be used, eventually making you redundant in the process
All I post anymore is anti-AI sentiment because it just feels like we're in a cycle of blind trust. A lot of FOSS seems cautious about LLMs for a plethora of reasons (quality and ethics among those) but we're a long way from making the tools that are supposedly going to replace us a locally runnable tool. So, until then, we're conceding pur agency to Anthropic and whoever else.
Meanwhile, war is breaking out and disrupting already stressed supply chains and manufacturing (for instance, Taiwan relies heavily on natural gas). Many manufacturers are starting to ditch production of consumer hardware, the supposed hardware folks ITT want to run their local models on. The vast majority of datacenters aren't being built yet, and those that are being built are missing their targets, still have aging GPUs in boxes without the infrastructure to power and turn them on, all while floating hundreds of billions in debt.
Surely I can't be the only one who sees the issues here? Each topic is hours of "what ifs" and a massive gamble to see if any of it will come together in a way that will be good for anyone who visits HN.
Or, more likely, they churn off the product.
The SaaS platforms that will survive are busy RIGHT NOW revamping their APIs, implementing oauth, and generally reorganizing their products to be discovered and manipulated by agents. Failing in this effort will ultimately result in the demise of any given platform. This goes for larger SaaS companies, too, it’ll just take longer.
When AI will eventually become the primary means to write code (because hand-programming is going to be slow enough that no company can continue like before) then that means AI becomes your new compiler that comes with a price tag, a subscription.
Programmers were held hostage to commercial compilers until free compilers reached sufficient level of quality, but now it doesn't matter if your disk is full of free/open toolchains if it's not you who is commanding them but commercial AI agents.
Undoubtedly there will be open-source LLMs eventually, of various levels of quality. But to write a free compiler you need a laptop while to train a free programming LLM you need a lot of money. And you also need money to run it.
Programming has been one of the rare arts that even a poor, lower class kid can learn on his own with an old, cheap computer salvaged from a scrap bin and he can raise himself enough intellectual capital to become a well-paid programmer later. I wonder what the equivalent path will be in the future.
LLMs don't make programming faster, they just accelerate the technical debt process.
On agregate they slow everything down because you there's more technical debt at the end of the tunnel.
(OpenClaw is already unmaintainable today - for example, nobody has any clue what configuration options it supports, not even LLMs. Game over.)
The AI propaganda articles are getting more devious my the minute. It's not just propaganda---it's Bernays-level manipulation!
My prompts to Claude has evolved from "what program / data source do I need to do this" to "what program / data source do I need, to make you do this for me".
After a few iterations, any data source without a free API feed, or any program without a free CLI interface are edited out of the gene pool, so to speak.
The Sunsama example actually argues the opposite direction. He spent an afternoon hacking around a closed system with an agent and it worked. If agents are good enough to reverse-engineer and workaround proprietary software today, the urgency to switch to open source decreases, not increases. "Good enough" workarounds are how SaaS stays sticky.
And agents don't eliminate the trust problem, they move it. Today you trust Sunsama with your workflows. In this vision, you trust your agent to correctly interpret your intent, modify code safely, and not introduce security holes. Non-technical users can't audit agent-modified code any better than they could audit the original source. You've traded one black box for another.
Companies buy these contracts for support and to have a throat to choke if things go wrong. It doesn't matter how much you pay your AI vendor, if you use their product to "vibe code" a SaaS replacement and it fails in some way and you lose a bunch of money/time/customers/reputation/whatever, then that's on you.
This is as much a political consideration as a financial one. If you're a C-suite and you let your staff make something (LLM generated or not) and it gets compromised then you're the one who signed off on the risky project and it's your ass on the line. If you buy a big established SaaS, do your compliance due-diligence (SOC2, ISO27001, etc.), and they get compromised then you were just following best practice. Coding agents don't change this.
The truth is that the people making the choice about what to buy or build are usually not the people using the end result. If someone down the food chain had to spend a bunch of time with "brittle hacks" to make their workflow work, they're not going to care at all. All they want is the minimum possible to meet whatever the requirement is, that isn't going to come back to bite them later.
SaaS isn't about software, it's about shifting blame.
I don’t know what SaaS has to do with FOSS. The point of FOSS was to allow me to modify the software I run on my system. If the device drivers for some hardware I depend on are no longer supported by the company I bought it from, if it’s open source, I can modify and extend the software myself.
The Copy Left licenses ensure that I share my modifications back if I distribute them. It’s a thing for the public good.
Agent-based software development walls people off from that. Mostly by ensuring that the provenance of the code it generates is not known and by deskilling people so that they don’t know what to prompt or how to fix their code.
They can often wire up a library or scaffold a migration, but they’re still pretty shaky at the “should we choose this at all?” layer — pricing cliffs, version floors, lock-in, EOLs, migration blockers, etc.
If coding agents do end up making free software more useful again, I think part of that will come from making open docs / changelogs / migration guides more usable at decision time, not just at implementation time.
Top down with a "manager" agent telling "coding" agents what to do? I.e. mirroring the existing corporate interpretation of "agile"/scrum development.
I was thinking and seeing the title of this article, it would be interesting to setup a agent environment that mirrors a typical open source project involving a discussion forum (where features are thrown around) and a github issue/PR (where implementation details are discussed) and then have a set of agents that are "mergers" - acting as final review instances.
I assume that agents can be organised in any form at all, it's just a matter of setting up the system prompt and then letting them go for it. A discourse forum could be set up where agents track the feature requests of users of the software and then discuss how to implement it or how to workaround it.
The reason I ask is because one could then do a direct comparison of development processes, i.e. the open source model versus the corporate top-down process. It would interest me to see which process performance better in terms of maintainability, quality and feature richness.
That would basically make users a product manager and UX designer, which they aren't really capable of currently. At most they will discover what they think they want isn't what they actually want.
these are exciting times, that are coming despite any pessimism rooted in our out-dated software paradigms.
It compares and contrasts open source and free software, and then gives an example of how free software is better than closed software.
But if the premise of the article, that the agent will take the package you pick and adapt it to your needs, is correct, then honestly the agent won't give a rat's ass whether the starting point was free source or open source.
(luckily my projects are unpopular enough that nobody bothered training on them lol)
Value isn't just slapping a license on something and pushing to GitHub. It's maintaining and curating that software over years, focusing the development towards a goal. It's as much telling users what features you're not willing to add and maintain as it is extending the project to interoperate with others.
And that long term commitment to maintenance hasn't come out of the vibe coded ecosystem. Commitment is exactly what they don't want, rather they want the fast sugar high before they drop it and move on to the next thing.
The biggest threat to open source is the strip mining of the entire ecosystem, destroying communities and practices that have made it thrive for decades. In the past, open source didn't win because it always had the best implementation, but because it was good enough to solve problems for enough people that it became self sustaining from the contribution of value.
I feel that will continue, but it's also going to take a set back from those that aren't interested in contributing value back into the ecosystem from which they have extracted so much.
The worst part is building something open source, getting positive feedback, helping a couple of startups and then some big corporation comes along and implements a similar product and then everyone gets forced by their bosses to use the corporate product against their will and people eventually forget your product exists because there are no high-paying jobs allowing people to use it.
With hindsight, Open Source is basically a con for corporations to get free labor. When you make software free for everyone, really you're just making it free for corporations to Embrace, Extend, Extinguish... They invest a huge amount of effort to suppress the sources of the ideas.
Our entire system is heavily optimized for decoupling products from their makers. We have almost no idea who is making any of the products we buy. I believe there is a reason for that. Open source is no different.
When we lived in caves, everyone in the tribe knew who caught the fish or who speared the buffalo. They would rightly get credit. Now, it's like; because none of the rich people are doing any useful work, they can only maintain credibility by obfuscating the source of the products we buy. They do nothing but control stuff. Controlling stuff does not add value. Once a process is organized, additional control only serves to destroy value through rent extraction.
AI backdoors are already a well known problem, and vibe-coded free software is always going to present a substantial risk. We'll see how it plays out in time, but I can already see where it's heading.
After enough problems, reputation and humans in the loop could finally become important again. But I have a feeling humanity is going to have to learn the hard way first (again).
This is a bullshit argument, and I'm surprised that people aware enough of these issues would try to push it.
Closed (or online-only) software prevents not only the end user from modifying it, but also 'unlicensed' hackers that the end user can ask for help.
See the "right to repair" movement as a very close example. The possibility of an 'ecosystem' of middlemen like these, matters !
Some kind of artisan "proper" quality work, compared to cheap enterprise AI slop.
I think Pete Hegseth would disagree with this statement.
Conflict of interests is the norm. It should be illegal for a company founder or director to own stock of a supplier. It should be illegal for shareholders to own stocks of two competing companies. Index funds should be illegal.
