- 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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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.
Unfortunately I didn’t clone the repository before it was taken down.
Maybe check the https://www.softwareheritage.org/ if rember the names?
Capitalism is why we can’t have nice things.
LLMs are just a tool.
Tool used to fuck the poor.
Exaaaactly. None of this would be a problem if everyone’s basic necessities were a guarantee: housing, food, water, essential utilities. Think of all the cool stuff we’d have if all these OSS developers weren’t worried about putting food on the table. I would give zero shits if my open source work was “stolen” to make a profit by some giant company if I didn’t have to worry about making enough money to survive.
Billionaires are why we can’t have nice things. And also why we have LLMs.
It’s correlation, not causation.
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.
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.
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.
His point seems to be rather that he has been using a monetisation approach to his work where he released his work open source and then used the exposure of it to sell his services, which is now being taken away because LLMs hide him from the equation and all the person sees on the other side is “ai solved it for me”. That sounds to me more like a business model that leverages open source, which he is now considering changing and charging everyone instead because his previous one is being made impossible. It doesn’t sound like he is doing this as a hobby, but as a job. It’s not different than being a self employed photographer, writer etc - all the other professions which are revolting against AI for the exact same reason.
To your metaphor, it’s more akin to someone going around the street and recording the best songs of every musician there and then putting it on YouTube with a label of “don’t bother going to this place, here’s the music you wanted”. Not only do they not get money directly, nor are they getting any credit or royalty but it even removes the chance of them getting anything out of it, even if it’s just exposure to further their career.
I’m pretty sure few people will bask for 6-8 hours a day every day as a hobby without hoping to get something for it.
To your last point…Isn’t the definition of charity pretty much along the lines of offering services or resources to others without the expectation of profit? I get your point if it applies to the “I wrote some code which works for me, you can have it as is, good luck” situation alone but that’s incredibly rare in open source projects with any popularity (i.e. real users) - a lot of time and effort goes into supporting people and doing things you wouldn’t do for yourself.
Seems unwise to reduce the livelihood of people contributing what’s often essential software to busking.
If talented, expert people have no incentive into contributing to OSS, or have better incentives to apply their skills on something else, OSS loses and so does society.
There is a very real and fairly large “open source as a business model” crowd.
OSS gets them easier on ramping and engineer trust. Once the rapport is there in theory they will advocate for its use at their companies and in turn drive sales.
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 find it incredible, how uncharitable some of these comments here are. As an open source contributor myself, I also really don’t like the fact, that my work just gets stolen and profited of by big companies without my permission.
Even the nicest, most idealist engineer still needs to be able to live from his work. I am not saying he is, but he is completely within his right to protect his work from abuse.
Free software shouldn’t mean, that every company can use our code in any way, they like and open source licenses still have terms, for example copyleft licenses, like GPLv3, still require work, which is based on that code to be licensed with the same terms and appropriately credited. AI companies are clearly not abiding by these terms and aren’t really prosecuted for that.
We should be angry at the companies misusing our work instead of open source devs who have had enough.
This is the best comment of the thread.
So many people are nitpicking his post or criticizing the platform that he shares it on (let’s me honest, linkedIN has a much wider impact than the fediverse if something “goes corporate viral”). People deserve to be compensated for their work.
We shouldn’t be mad at the devs trying to make a living, even those who have different views about what open source is. We should be banding together against the companies who’s entire business model is based on theft and abuse. New anti-AI licenses specifically, techniques to poison AI data baked into every repo, class action lawsuits against companies, etc…
Once Universal Basic Income gets implemented and you don’t need to be paid directly for your work to survive, then we bicker incessantly about the finer points of the real definition of open source.
Bullhlshit. You think they werent using your libraries before for profit.
Free software shouldnt mean that every company can use our code in anyway they like.
That is exactly what free means. I have never seen people write attributions for nuget or js packages used.
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.
God forbid a technical person becomes an adult and starts understanding power, money, and politics. Engineers should be babies playing with their toys and being idealistic and irresponsible about their impact on the world.
There’s a big difference between being an adult and seeing everything exclusively through the lens of how it can be used to turn a profit for yourself or some other capitalist.
I think this guy just wants to be payed for all of his work. If big companies start to skip the part of even crediting him for the that they stole without his permission, I can understand his decision to deny them that ability.
Yea it it’s really too bad this guy wants to eat
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.
His opinion is actually that AI can use his code no problem, they just have to pay a fee.
The problem is that the big LLM AI companies will just say… ‘Fuck off’, because they don’t like paying for any data, and they also think their models will be advanced enough to write their own libraries soon (if not now, depending how much they believe their own marketing hype).
Pricing is an additional unanswered problem in his new model. As a hypothetical: if 1000 traditional OSS users generate $1000 value in conversion to paid users in his old model - what would an AI license cost? Because one license (eg to Anthropic/Claude) would theoretically be cutting off millions of users, maybe 80%+ of his userbase. Would he ask for millions as a licensing fee?
Whole idea is half-baked IMO, but I am sympathetic to the bullshit situation he finds himself in.
You’re right. Personally, I’d rather support FOSS development. His justification isn’t 100% right but some of the idea resonates with me.
I think this model, however it may work will still be better than what we have currently though. If we can even attempt to charge AI-companies for the training data, that would be a huge step. Because the current model is just they take everything, that they can get their hands on.
And if that makes AI-devellopment ecomically unviable, that’s a really good thing
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.
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.
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.
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.
Posts code on GitHub (Microsoft) Complains on LinkedIn about AI stealing open source code (Microsoft)
Why would the open source community do this to me???
Lol no I get it, AI is coming to devour us all, and it is just waiting until it can gets enough nourishment from code
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.
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.
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 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).
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.
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.
