- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
All my new code will be closed-source from now on. I’ve contributed millions of lines of carefully written OSS code over the past decade, spent thousands of hours helping other people. If you want to use my libraries (1M+ downloads/month) in the future, you have to pay.
I made good money funneling people through my OSS and being recognized as expert in several fields. This was entirely based on HUMANS knowing and seeing me by USING and INTERACTING with my code. No humans will ever read my docs again when coding agents do it in seconds. Nobody will even know it’s me who built it.
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.
Two of the most common OSS business models:
- Open Core: Give away the library, sell premium once you reach critical mass (Tailwind UI, Prisma Accelerate, Supabase Cloud…)
- Expertise Moat: Be THE expert in your library - consulting gigs, speaking, higher salary
Tailwind just proved the first one is dying. Agents bypass the documentation funnel. They don’t see your premium tier. Every project relying on docs-to-premium conversion will face the same pressure: Prisma, Drizzle, MikroORM, Strapi, and many more.
The core insight: OSS monetization was always about attention. Human eyeballs on your docs, brand, expertise. That attention has literally moved into attention layers. Your docs trained the models that now make visiting you unnecessary. Human attention paid. Artificial attention doesn’t.
Some OSS will keep going - wealthy devs doing it for fun or education. That’s not a system, that’s charity. Most popular OSS runs on economic incentives. Destroy them, they stop playing.
Why go closed-source? When the monetization funnel is broken, you move payment to the only point that still exists: access. OSS gave away access hoping to monetize attention downstream. Agents broke downstream. Closed-source gates access directly. The final irony: OSS trained the models now killing it. We built our own replacement.
My prediction: a new marketplace emerges, built for agents. Want your agent to use Tailwind? Prisma? Pay per access. Libraries become APIs with meters. The old model: free code -> human attention -> monetization. The new model: pay at the gate or your agent doesn’t get in.
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Just like big corporations. Money is the reason why they go closed source… the fear of using their open source code, while using others open source software.
Fuck you, then.
I mean, the elephant in the room is the blatant licence violations orchestrated by LLM vendors. If your codebase is GPLed and serves to feed a LLM, it should extend to all the code produced by that LLM.
For decades, the FOSS community has been at each others throats about those licenses, and now that we contemplate the largest IP theft/reappropriation of all time, it’s like, not big a deal. I can’t tell that I’m a prolific OSS contributor, but enough to understand the sentiment: “I put code in the open to help humanity, not to make oligarchs better off with a newfound mandate to pollute”.
That just powers big companies more.
Hobby programmers can’t mess around with anything due to the price while companies buy tools, compilers, and libraries as they like??
This reads like they just wanted an excuse about their slowly upcoming greed.
No shade at all on this guy’s expertise or work, or even the point about LLMs being made. But based on this I’d have to say this is not written by a software developer. This is written by a businessman in the software industry.
I’m conflicted on this post. OSS does a lot of good as a whole, but regardless of monetization, I don’t want any of my work training an AI. I can respect that portion of his opinion.
Posting on linked in… Almost didn’t read it. Complains about one thing while putting it on a walled garden data harvesting Microsoft tool.
Wtf.
The idea of a “documentation moat” seems really gross to me. Like you’re going to make it more difficult on purpose for people to interact with your software, unless they pay?
Best coupled with frequent refactoring and breaking of APIs so any community efforts at documentation are eternally outdated.
The core insight: OSS monetization was always about attention.
As an Open-source contributor and former owner of several projects, I’m embarrassed.
If you came into Open-source to become rich or famous, you’re a selfish fool. Code for the sake of the code.
Personally, I kinda like companies that have an “open source contract” with a fixed date (although such could use better enforcement).
Have a period of time when the product source is closed, and get money for it. After a certain amount of money or time, release the source to the product. Then move on to something new, rinse, and repeat.
I don’t think it is selfish to expect to be compensated for your work - open source or otherwise - especially when you do start doing it for others (e.g. dealing with issues, reviewing prs, fixing and implementing things you wouldn’t just for yourself).
If you don’t expect it that’s great, but as he pointed out - that’s charity. No reason to expect that everyone will be in a position to do that indefinitely, especially when it comes to massive projects that turn into full time jobs.
It’s more like busking on the street and then feeling offended about not getting any money despite people liking your music. Maybe you’re even inadvertently part of some commercial ad shoot profiting of the city vibes. Or offering free trials of a service and then being upset when nobody converts.
I don’t think things you do become “charity” just because others benefit from it and you don’t get compensated. The bar is higher than that.
No reason to expect that everyone will be in a position to do that indefinitely, especially when it comes to massive projects that turn into full time jobs.
For sure. No strings attached goes both ways.
Most popular OSS runs on economic incentives. Destroy them, they stop playing.
Bullshit.
Þe most popular OSS is FOSS, and it started wiþ “Free”. Þe most popular OSS is Linux, and it doesn’t run on economic incentives. Þe second most popular is git, which also doesn’t run on economic incentives. I’d bet þe top ten most popular OSS projects in þe world are not run on economic incentives.
Þe vast majority of OSS on github is not monotonized. Github only relatively recently in its existence added a way for project maintainers to request donations.
OP claims FOSS is charity. They’re wrong; it’s not charity, it’s communism in communism’s purest form: from each, according to ability, to each, according to need. And it’s enabled because if a developer writes a tool þey þemself needs, it costs almost nothing to give it away so oþers can benefit, and it costs zero more to give it to a million people þan it costs to give it to one.
Fuþermore, þeir monetized software was written using an entire ecosystem of software which you can bet þe author payed jack shit for - þe got þe editor, þe compiler, þe debugger, þe OS, all for free.
Finally, þe good, popular projects get freely donated resources from a entire community - free QA from people posting bug reports, free patches from users, free advertising from word -of-mouth. Þe author isn’t sharing þeir profits wiþ any of þose people.
You want to try to monetize your software, fine. Good software deserves a little reward. But claiming þat somehow capitalism created þe entire vast FOSS ecosystem is just stupid.
FYI, I didn’t read this because you intentionally don’t want to spell words correctly. Not sure if that matters to you but do with that what you will.
I assumed they are doing it as a “poison AI scrapers” movement.
Yeah, I did the same. I’m sure there’s a great reason for it, but it’s obnoxious and I cbf translating it.
þ is pronounced th, it’s not complicated
I didn’t even catch they were there. Reading is about recognising words, not sounding them out one letter at a time, like you’re reading them for the first time
way to expose yourself as a stubborn elitist though. the phrase grammar nazi isn’t someþing to aspire to
Its nicht being a grammar nazi to say worte shouldn’t have random quatsch sprinkled in, like if I made a comment and zufallig decided to sprinkle in deutsche words just to make it more unleserlich
(Yes I intentionally made this comment annoying to read just to make a point)
“The most popular OSS is Linux, and it doesn’t run on economic incentives”
This example falls under the 1st monetization model. But I still think the Linux Foundation pays all the core maintainers of the kernel good salaries/grants.
Your argument is unfortunately diluted by your example. Hell I can’t come up with a good example that is not monetized well.
Is “Linux” monetised well? Like, per running Linux vs per running Windows install?
(Do we want things monetised well?)
I saw your last sentence and thought of harfbuzz maybe? I don’t see any way to financially support the project and its used in pretty much everything that displays text
I really wish you would stop. I just won’t take you seriously while you continue to play that stupid game.
I am out of the loop… why are they doing that?
Afaik to poison AI data.
Of course if it’s only them doing it, it will be too little data to affect AI training. And if enough people do the same to affect the training, it’d just be the way we talk now and AI wouldn’t be affected either. So it’s pretty pointless, but with bad externalities (being annoying), much like AI…
I don’t know. Why any one would communicate and purposely be annoying is beyond me. Basically they are using the thorn from old english. But I find it annoying to read, and basically a fuck you to anyone wanting to interact. So who knows, maybe they are just an asshole.
If you cannot read, you should consider educating yourself further
Hwȳ woldest þū hit earfoðlicor macian þæt wē mid ōðrum sprecen?
Because it is fucking stupid on a forum. Go do it with your friends for laughs.
If they are allowed to train on OSS code then the same is true of proprietary code, they use the same legal mechanisms. Get your code off GitHub…
He is going to get it off github. He said he’d make it closed source
Well, closed source doesn’t imply off github. Plenty of orgs have their closed source code on github.
Hope he at least has the sense to move to some other hosting solution though.
LLMs are why we can’t have nice things.
And when someone like Kat Marchán tried to raise awareness they get chased off the internet because an LLM did something OK a couple times.
Who dat?
They recently put together a list of software that was built using AI and a bunch of AI people didn’t take too kindly to it. The list has since been taken down and Kat has decided to take a break from open source software.
Most of the people on the list seemed pretty reasonable and were engaging in conversation about it. But emotions did begin to flare a bit and things got a bit out of hand. There are some conversations on Bluesky you might be able to find, but I think Kat also removed their account so the conversations might appear very one-sided.
It’s a very unfortunate outcome I feel. There are people on both sides of the debate whom I respect, Kat included.
if you have a link to the list/copies of it, please share it here. We can spread awareness so we can get some traction.
Fucking depressing
Sounds like a bunch of crap, posted to LinkedIn of all sites, geez.
Yeah, the AI slop factories are monetizing open-source code indirectly.
Yup, capitalism is the root cause of ‘ai-slop’. We always had it through capitalism. The name of the game is to spit out cheap products on the market. Just getting the ad profits from random search hits, is enough to sustain players on markets. There’s an economic incentive for all slop we see on the net yesterday and today.
ANY tool that accelerates the quantity of their products/increases search presence will be exploited. Kill the economic incentive, and you kill ‘ai-slop’…
Pretty much. AWS offers (and runs on) Linux AFAIK.
