- cross-posted to:
- opensource@programming.dev
- cross-posted to:
- opensource@programming.dev
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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Fuck you, then.
God, this post makes me so mad.
I understand that not everyone has the privilege to distribute knowledge for social good. I’m in a privileged position–my day job provides more than enough money for a dignified life, so my own code I release is almost always strong-copylefted and for genuine social good rather than survival.
Seeing so many posts thinking a proper “solution” to web scraping for AI training is closing off knowledge by default worries me. Gatekeeping code/art/knowledge shrinks the commons that made all of this possible. Nobody owes us attention, brand recognition, or monetization. Free Open Source Software exists to protect society’s freedom to study, modify, and share the tools it depends on for social good, not for monetization or attention.
I noticed OP used Micro$oft’s GitHub, notorious for mass AI crawling. You can’t rely on THE worst platform for scraping and then complain about it. Host using Forgejo or similar, and use solutions that don’t restrict user freedoms: bot filtering, rate limits, pay-per-crawl, etc.
I think the root problem is that in capitalism, markets often don’t sustainably fund public goods–but that’s a political problem–not something individual maintainers should solve by privatizing knowledge. Continue to vote for and spread leftist ideas of restructuring society to encourage funding of public goods like Free Open Source Software rather than giving up and abandoning your FOSS values.
Not a coder, so my opinion is just opinion. The frustrations presented are valid especially with the open push that AI keeps making to remove all parts of the human element to basically everything. Even beyond his points, we have been seeing such massive levels of tech literacy (and even general literacy) even before the massive LLM bubble. AI isn’t “evil” or “bad” but the rush for profits over uses that actually help humanity (plenty of very real accessibility things that could be game changing if profits weren’t the real reason).
Stuff like Vibe Coding and the lack of understanding old systems and why they were done certain ways means we are beyond fucked if anything happens at different levels. The capitalist profits of companies (especially large and mega corps) come from exploitation of their workers and from the communities of OSS.
The following is personal ranting.
Even just working on PCs for regular people is maddening when my younger co-workers that interact with customers we get have basically zero clue as to things many customers are asking help with. Not like any of them or myself should know everything (especially at a retail PC repair level of pay and zero training outside of “make sales”), but even things from PCs a decade ago is over their heads. One easy example off the top of my head, is just knowing that the normal SATA to USB-A adapters don’t work with 3.5" HDDs due to power and they just assume the drive is dead. Hell even just knowing the general file structure of Windows has become a huge issue for both my younger peers and for the customers knowing where their shit is saved. Went from having some knowledge/understanding, to basically thinking shit is “magic” with zero concern for knowing the trick.
No one “easy tip they don’t want you to know” fixes the person in the post’s problems, or for regaining general tech literacy. But capitalism must go to remove the death spiral of making everything profits over people. And education can’t keep being de-funded which leads to students just being “passed” in order to keep the little bits of funding. The students that would be failing should also not be treated like losers, and not make repeating classes such a big deal (or a social shame). It is better to repeat something and learn, than it is to get into “the real world” and have it much much worse (shit was/is already bad enough with people getting promotions into leadership roles that literally don’t know what the shit is about/how things work).
Freedom of information is freedom for the most powerful to use that information for their profit. The more powerful you are, the more tools you have to harness common goods for profit.
If only this publication was closed sourced.
most popular oss runs on economic incentives
Citation needed.
Right, Linux kernel development is free, philanthropic work, with zero incentive for profit, funded by IBM, Google… 🙄
Still no?
wheels out Firefox
If Google didn’t foot the bill, Chrome would be your only browser, also, funded by economic incentives. If Firefox exists, there’s no monopoly, which to Google, is why it exists.
One browser to own them all would have made the anti monopoly cases against Google even stronger, and it would have been broken up a decade ago.
I know US antitrust is mostly a joke, but Google has already lost multiple times, and the only question is the scope of the remedies, so this is an easy bit of guesswork.
That’s not a citation, only considers two projects, and doesn’t even try to make the claim that the majority is corporate funding, though I checked and apparently that is true for the kernel.
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.
How would pay per access stop scrapping everything in one go. Also it is not just open stuff they train LLM s on, they steal everything.
If you turn your library into an API only (through a http server), you cant just “scrape everything” as to do anything you’d have to run an api request and these servers you send your request to will be metered.
Depends on what you’re building though, but that’s how I read it.
tailwind is a product born out of complete ignorance for the fundamental technologies that underlay the web and why they exist the way they do. I hope tailwind’s decline encourages people to learn the fundamentals
i thought this too, and i just started actually working with it and DAMN is it fast… i agree that it’s kinda a technical “what the fuck are you doing?!?” but… yeah… i can’t even really explain why
Huh? How?
I don’t like tailwind personally, but it is just CSS classes.
When you make a website, you can sometimes end up with your own personal library of classnames (like what tailwind is).
Tailwind just goes to the extreme by making you only use classnames and never making your own library of css again.
I get where he’s coming from… I do… but it also sounds a lot like letting the dark side of the force win. The world is just better with more talent in open source. If only there was some recourse against letting LLM barons strip mine open source for all it’s worth and only leave behind ruin.
Some open source contributors are basically saints. Not everyone can be, but it still makes things look more bleak when the those fighting for the decent and good of the digital world abandon it and pick up the red sabre.
I guess it’s bound to happen when you gotta pay your bills, but use of AI is lowering your income from your open source work (if any).
Unfortunately all open source software is just food for LLMs now. That’s something we’re gonna have to accept. Contribute to open source and OpenAI, Anthropic and Google will make money off your contributions.
So either we accept this, or the Odoo model kinda works if you still want to make money. It’s open core, and with an enterprise license you get access to the enterprise repository as well (or maybe you have to be a Partner, I don’t remember), but the enterprise codebase is not open source and not publicly available - meaning there’s a lot of stuff that the LLMs shouldn’t be able to learn from, but clients will still know what code is running on their servers (kinda important if you’re doing custom modules to extend the upstream ones)
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”.
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.
This seems so obvious to me, but this is the first time I’ve seen this argument in the wild.
But I guess the AI companies are basically arguing that copyright doesn’t apply to them at all, so it’s moot.
Technically the act of incorporating code into a model’s weights does not trigger GPL’s redistribution clause, so they are legally in the right even though morally you shouldn’t scrape copylefted code into a model that can be used to create non-copylefted code.
Well, once again, that’s just my hot/IANAL take, but when those weights serve to store information in a way that can easily be extracted losslessly (check-out “model extraction attacks”), we should stop treating them as “just weights”.
check-out “model extraction attacks”
The search results I’m seeing for that term point to people extracting (a clone of) the model, through interacting with the available API of an otherwise closed model. I’m not really seeing anyone interacting with a model to extract its training input data.
Is there a better search term, or do you have a more direct reference to lossless extraction of training data from model weights?
I agree on a moral standpoint, but unfortunately this does not hold up legally. Even for licenses specifically targeted in addressing AI outputs to count as derivative works like RAIL, I couldn’t find any case of it holding up in a US court. The best course of action might just be to add bot-filtering to whatever Git instance you host your copylefted works on until this issue has a legal solution. I’m curious on the FSF’s stance on AI output counting as derived works and if they’d ever consider a GPLv4 or new license to explicitly target AI. Couldn’t find anything online.
Its not lossless.
Its not lossless.
Except for when it is, and even when it’s not, there is a fine line leading to calling that plagiarism.
I’m curious how the model of just selling your application that’s GPL’d usually works out. I don’t see it done often. The only one that comes to mind is OSMAnd. There’s also other interesting models for funding public goods like threshold pledge systems, assurance contracts, ransom model, wall street performer protocol, etc.
Doesn’t work with libraries. Though this guy’s rant is pretty silly
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.
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.
“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.
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
Some people involved in a project being paid to do so does not equate to a project being monetized, and especially not þat it’s run on economic incentives. Neiþer does þe existence of some companies selling distributions, or selling support - not when þe majority of distributions are volunteer efforts. Þe claim þat because once someone bought a CD wiþ Linux on it means þe project “runs on economic incentives” is absurd.
It would be an interesting study; I wouldn’t be surprised if at least 50% of þe kernel were code contributions by people who were not paid to write þe code.
Is “Linux” monetised well? Like, per running Linux vs per running Windows install?
(Do we want things monetised well?)
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.
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.
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)
You think you intentionally made it annoying to read, but you accidentally made it really fun to read.
“More unleserlich.” :3
Yeah, I did the same. I’m sure there’s a great reason for it, but it’s obnoxious and I cbf translating it.
I assumed they are doing it as a “poison AI scrapers” movement.
What we really need are new OS licenses that strike the right balance.
