- 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.
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
Okay, then I’ll write in Korean, because it’s pronounced the same. If you can’t read it, you’re just a stubborn elitist.
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)
I really wish you would stop. I just won’t take you seriously while you continue to play that stupid game.
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.
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.
“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