- 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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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 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)
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).
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 pray Tailwind dies. React too. And JavaScript/TypeScript while we’re at it.
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.
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.
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.
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”.
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”.
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.
I have no idea who this guy is, but he sounds more like a shareholder/executive than an open source contributor.
He’s authored 60 repos on Github and has forked another 95.
https://github.com/marcj?tab=repositories&q=&type=source&language=&sort=
He also founded companies and used to be CTO: https://www.linkedin.com/in/marc-j-schmidt-957875110
So I suppose he’s both.
That seems like an extremely uncharitable read (to be clear, I don’t know him either).
But he’s not just a “contributor”, I think we need a word that better describes people like him. It sounds like he’s shaped his career and the software he’s written, thoughtfully in the direction of open source.
He’s saying the previously established way of having a career and OSS projects has been broken by the introduction of AI agents.
How are you getting “shareholder”??
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.
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.
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.
Would you say more? Are you saying he hasn’t contributed the open source stuff he claims? Or that someone else wrote this for him? Something else?
No no, nothing like that. There just seems to be a baseline attitude in the blog post that monetization is the end goal of all OSS. Like, the idea that OSS developers deserve to be compensated fairly for their work, I fully support, but I don’t read that as the argument being made here. It reads more as “OSS is no longer a viable way to make money, so I’m going closed-source.”
Okay, I see what you mean. I’m usually pretty sensitive to things that smell like exploitation for financial gain, and it didn’t trigger that response for me.
But after hearing some of the less hostile takes here (like yours) I think I have to acknowledge it’s me, there may be some bias I’m unaware of going into my reading on this one.
Thanks for elaborating.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
I don’t think you can compare high quality mature OSS projects to busking. I love buskers and busking, I’m old school punk. But the analogy to busking in the software world would be just random devs’ small personal projects.
The better analogy for a big mature project and the phenomena the author is describing:
- team of people create a large scale professional grade musical performance and allow attendance for free
- til now, enough people come to the free show that spend money in other ways to sustain the whole thing
- now, gigantic companies stole everything in the show, put it into their giant entertainment library, giving nothing back, and there are no longer enough attendees to support the free show
I can see disagreeing with what to do about the problem, but it’s bizarre to me to see the “fuck AI in every way” place turn around and attack this guy.
I’m involved with people organizing free rave parties of all sizes and production grades and it’s something I hold dear so your analogy hits close to home!
They all have income streams from outside the scene, including the ones responsible for events with thousands of attendants. While there are countless stories of people making industry connections promoting their careers and getting work there, a DJ or producer expecting they will be able to sustain a professional career purely through scene exposure or free parties is delusional.
That a few have been fortunate and resourceful enough to do so for a while is great but it’s not an indictement of the scene if one of them makes a “The Scene Is Dead” post on Instagram that they’re tired of the freeloaders and only doing paid gigs from now on. If they then continue publicly theorizing on how one could successfully financially exploit this community, they shouldn’t be surprised if the people who have been volunteering (usually a better characterization than charity IMO) for years feel rubbed the wrong way.
it’s bizarre to me to see the “fuck AI in every way” place turn around and attack this guy
Agreed in the mobbing of the wider thread but I hope you don’t see that going on here?
What a great reply, I think I sincerely understand your POV now, as well as the similar ones from others.
Thanks!
And thank you for the refining exchange!
I also recognize that both the rave scene and free software are enabled in part by people with cushy high-paying jobs and what Lemmy would call rich kids who don’t mind sinking some money (and sometimes employer goodwill) into their passion without expecting any returns.
Literally everything is so annoyingly nuanced, couldn’t agree more lol. Cheers!
(Edit: well. Certainly not everything.)
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.
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.
