This is a foreign position to me. I open sourced my code not to make money but because I saw that others can benefit from it. I never made money from open source. If I did my mental model would be that these are charitable donations, not an income stream I can rely on.
The entire argument is framed through an anti-open-source view which sees participation as entirely motivated by money.
It's an unfortunate presentation that makes it more difficult to sympathise with - and ultimately it may not matter; either somebody else will fill the gap or the LLMs he resents will help coders create their products without the libraries he seems to think are valueless without a set financial cost.
Monetizing open source never made sense for me. Mostly because I operate from selfish viewpoint. Why would I pay for something that is provided for free? It is starting to seem like I was right. You have to fund it from selling a product. Or be one of the few that are valuable enough to be paid for running it. But those are exceedingly rare in total population and don't make scalable business model.
I feel the same way as this person, but I’m leaning even more into open-source. I’m building an open-source SaaS for every vertical and even though it’s open-source, we offer cloud hosting, yet most users deploy on their servers. Our cloud hosting is just one source of monetization, our main monetization is a decentralized marketplace around these SaaS.
My point is, monetizing open-source is really hard. Tailwind was giving bricks away for free while selling you a house. Given enough time, people used those bricks to build houses and gave them away for free.
Tailwind makes more money than ever through donation, but that isn't a business. It's the tailwind proprietary themes that wasn't doing well. It's just bad to say tailwind is losing because of AI.
I'm writing OSS code with the intent to replace git. I know my position is very different, but to me openness is not a critical vulnerability when facing big companies but my secret weapon.
For me the best outcome is taking over all the market currently held by git and GitHub, and the worst outcome would be that Microsoft somehow pulls an embrace-extend-extinguish on us. But my goal, and I think I've been successful here, is to slam the door in the face of anyone who would be able to easily improve on my work and therefore would be able to undercut my value proposition with theirs. We want to be the first people offering a strongly differentiated service by building a platform that does not in any way sit on top of the MS platform, so that nothing we do is actually a direct benefit to them anyway and we actually get consumers excited about change!
This is the same death grip that Microsoft currently has on OSS. They made their tools so ubiquitous that even their most vigorous competitors make things that just feel like knock-offs because the competitors can't afford not to build on top of the same open core as MS: git and LSP. If you can't beat them you have to join them, and so I know exactly what I need to do to win: tweak the economic incentives until joining me is preferable to competing with me, and then instead of charity we'll simply take GitHub's billions in revenue as our revenue.
My OSS project wasn’t nearly as well used, but it also was making someone else money, and I also put a lot of time into it without getting paid.
I never had the time or understanding to setup a business around it, so in the end I just got rid of everything. No more open source unless it’s purely for my own enjoyment.
I’m VERY appreciative of free and open source projects and organizations that don’t try to make money. The FSF, GNU, Linux- I love these! I would love if the world just focused on these! I would use a Linux desktop and phone if they were in that Apple sweetspot (iOS 26 not included) of ease for techs and non-techs.
What I’ve noticed about successful open-source projects is that they have:
- a strong leader, who has dedicated their life to it, not as a secondary initiative, and who one day knows they must hand the reins to another
- a willing team that continues to bring in “new meat”
- a project that sells itself by filling a need that will remain for some time by many
- no need or desire for money
Those that end in failure involve:
- a leader/team that sees it as part-time volunteer work, and they do it because it makes them feel good about themselves; they are giving back
- the assumption that one day maybe they’ll get paid
> 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.
So what are the actual solutions, now that the cat is out of the bag?
Much like in the post, you could make it source available and have a free license for non-profits and development, but ask money for commercial usage, or different feature sets (like iframe-resizer, which we recently bought for a project, saved a bunch of time, but the AI models still were trained on it and knew how to use it). Or provide support, like many FOSS DBs and OSes should, same for libraries, maybe to have PostgreSQL dethrone Oracle and the likes just a little bit more.
Or maybe some ask-for-funding stuff defined at library level with the expectation that the AIs would present this information to whoever uses them. I don't particularly celebrate https://docs.npmjs.com/cli/v9/commands/npm-fund but I get why it's there - similarly we might get IDE plugins and CLI tools and such to present a summary of what libraries or projects were used/suggested in a task/chat session and how to give them money, much like how you'd get references to website sources when trying to ask AI to research something.
> My prediction: a new marketplace emerges, built for agents. Want your agent to use Tailwind? Prisma? Pay per access.
This probably already exists in the form of MCP solutions for up to date documentation for specific libraries and so on, to mitigate hallucinations.
Either way, we need to start implementing actual solutions so we don't keep ending up with https://staltz.com/software-below-the-poverty-line.html all the time. And not just some "human contract" approach of expecting that someone will go to your docs manually and see the banner that they can give you money for more bells and whistles or something. To me, that feels like wishful thinking.
AI or not, people's work should be rewarded and that needs some sort of standardization - and I hold that view even in regards to answering feature requests on GitHub, like if someone demands something, they should immediately have the option to place money into an escrow for when/if a solution is presented to them (or get the money back if not). If they don't, you have no obligation to help them unless from the goodness of your own heart and the innate desire to do so. Similarly, if I use 10 libraries, I should be able to say "Okay I have 50 bucks, I want to donate to all of these projects by executing a single npm command and confirming a PayPal payment or something."
Incidentally, that's also the first step towards building the Torment Nexus (capitalist incentives will find a way to turn this into a hellscape), but go figure.
While the observations might be true, I’m not sure going closed source is going to help here. If optimizing docs for AI makes you less visible, guess what else makes you less visible : not even being accessible.
Just because AI is "taking advantage" of projects being open source doesn’t mean the solution is direct closed source. Going with the most direct solution to a problem is an indication you might not have spent time thinking deeper about the problem
I don't mean to trivialize the OP's experience. This is definitely a very important matter and serious issue in the industry. So forgive me for raising a much smaller, side point.
> I've contributed millions of lines of carefully written OSS code over the past decade
I have never tracked my own output, but I would be surprised if I have written even a single million lines of code, let alone several.
Out of curiosity, is this common? Have people here actually written millions of lines of code themselves? Even assuming two million lines over thirty years, that still averages to around 180 lines per day, every day. It is doable but it is a very high level of sustained output.
I am not doubting the OP. Just noting that this represents an extraordinary amount of coding by any measure.
Side projects on my laptop in one language I use is currently about 200k lines (as measured by "wc -l" so includes blank lines and such). This covers about a decade and a half. This doesn't count all the lines added/changed/removed in the history, a few other languages I use, or anything for work.
Including all those other excluded things, I could see a million per decade across all languages and personal/work projects pretty easily for myself.
It's an incredibly complex topic, and I do feel for people who are now seeing a massive disruption to the existing ways to monetise their own work (they should be able to live comfortably).
It's quite ironic that they used an LLM to write or at least entirely re-format their post, when their topic is about the impact these systems have on the ongoing sustainability of the humans behind the work.
I personally don't use LLMs and generative models, I find their output way too untrustworthy and their practice of mining the data of others unsettling. Not that anything on the internet can be inherently trusted anyway.
Frustratingly, while I sympathize with their very real plight, I also have to agree with OP’s ultimate decision.
OSS was exploited by hyperscalers to build trillion-dollar industries atop of, but without ever suitably compensating, the creators of much of those tools for their work or sharing in the profit. Before AI, the community was already at a breaking point between private enterprise spouting “supply chain” bullshit at them to demand fixes and attention, or steamrolled small devs to prop up a big corp’s trademark or product, all the while never actually paying enough for the proper development and support of those products - look at NPM (leftpad and kik) as prime examples. Now you have these same big tech ghouls scraping small sites into oblivion with hostile bots, making token predictors that are deliberately engineered to never, ever direct someone to a primary source or site except as an absolute last resort (to keep folks “in app” for engagement metrics), and openly pitching AI coding agents as replacements for human coders forever.
In that context, it’s no fucking wonder that the OSS community is becoming increasingly hostile to the very norms that have left most of them broke and increasingly destitute. Hell, for up-and-coming devs emerging from bootcamps, the mantra of “contribute to OSS” makes zero sense in a Capitalist marketplace that’s pivoting hard towards AI-as-human-replacement; as the OP points out, why bother training your own replacement?
OSS won’t die, but this is a particularly painful chapter that emphasizes it cannot support itself through the (non-existent) generosity of Capital. Alternate funding schemes and organization models are needed to prepare and support it for the future, be they government grants, Academia sponsors, or outright Gov-funded Private or Public Corporations (e.g., BBC, Corporation for Public Broadcasting (RIP), etc). Updates to OSS licensing schemes barring use-cases or with more substantial teeth for commercial use are also needed, toeing the line between empowering users of general computing and extracting reasonable payments from businesses or enterprises.
There's no complexity in understanding an OSS author wanting to make money out of their hard work. People forget that OSS is about providing something useful to the world for free because they choose to do so. And anyone who doesn't want to follow this, or chooses to transition to a new model, should be respected with their decision. Accusing them of "greed" is to be out of touch and out of taste. This is as much a personal matter as it is about the current and future state of OSS in general.
But I use open source software because I can see and alter what's running. When you do this in a community of other developers, even as a user, you get a lot of stuff for free. I write FOSS software because I want to use it. I know the economics require give and take.
Yes, LLMs are all take. Yes, they bastardise the licenses and abuse the model. But they don't change why I want to use open source software. They don't change the fact that people need to keep writing it to keep receiving it.
Long story short, I think a lot fewer people are going to use Marc's software. He might be okay with the commercial realities of this (it might be a runaway success) but I think as non-developers get more acquainted with LLMs, being able to ask a bot to change how your system works is going to be more popular, not less, even if it's not the model RMS wanted.
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[ 4.5 ms ] story [ 52.5 ms ] threadMarx: Did it occurred to you to destroy the system that make robots doing your job a bad thing?
It's an unfortunate presentation that makes it more difficult to sympathise with - and ultimately it may not matter; either somebody else will fill the gap or the LLMs he resents will help coders create their products without the libraries he seems to think are valueless without a set financial cost.
So… SaaS and how every cloud provider already monetizes open-source code?
My point is, monetizing open-source is really hard. Tailwind was giving bricks away for free while selling you a house. Given enough time, people used those bricks to build houses and gave them away for free.
For me the best outcome is taking over all the market currently held by git and GitHub, and the worst outcome would be that Microsoft somehow pulls an embrace-extend-extinguish on us. But my goal, and I think I've been successful here, is to slam the door in the face of anyone who would be able to easily improve on my work and therefore would be able to undercut my value proposition with theirs. We want to be the first people offering a strongly differentiated service by building a platform that does not in any way sit on top of the MS platform, so that nothing we do is actually a direct benefit to them anyway and we actually get consumers excited about change!
This is the same death grip that Microsoft currently has on OSS. They made their tools so ubiquitous that even their most vigorous competitors make things that just feel like knock-offs because the competitors can't afford not to build on top of the same open core as MS: git and LSP. If you can't beat them you have to join them, and so I know exactly what I need to do to win: tweak the economic incentives until joining me is preferable to competing with me, and then instead of charity we'll simply take GitHub's billions in revenue as our revenue.
I never had the time or understanding to setup a business around it, so in the end I just got rid of everything. No more open source unless it’s purely for my own enjoyment.
I’m VERY appreciative of free and open source projects and organizations that don’t try to make money. The FSF, GNU, Linux- I love these! I would love if the world just focused on these! I would use a Linux desktop and phone if they were in that Apple sweetspot (iOS 26 not included) of ease for techs and non-techs.
What I’ve noticed about successful open-source projects is that they have:
- a strong leader, who has dedicated their life to it, not as a secondary initiative, and who one day knows they must hand the reins to another
- a willing team that continues to bring in “new meat”
- a project that sells itself by filling a need that will remain for some time by many
- no need or desire for money
Those that end in failure involve:
- a leader/team that sees it as part-time volunteer work, and they do it because it makes them feel good about themselves; they are giving back
- the assumption that one day maybe they’ll get paid
So what are the actual solutions, now that the cat is out of the bag?
Much like in the post, you could make it source available and have a free license for non-profits and development, but ask money for commercial usage, or different feature sets (like iframe-resizer, which we recently bought for a project, saved a bunch of time, but the AI models still were trained on it and knew how to use it). Or provide support, like many FOSS DBs and OSes should, same for libraries, maybe to have PostgreSQL dethrone Oracle and the likes just a little bit more.
Or maybe some ask-for-funding stuff defined at library level with the expectation that the AIs would present this information to whoever uses them. I don't particularly celebrate https://docs.npmjs.com/cli/v9/commands/npm-fund but I get why it's there - similarly we might get IDE plugins and CLI tools and such to present a summary of what libraries or projects were used/suggested in a task/chat session and how to give them money, much like how you'd get references to website sources when trying to ask AI to research something.
> My prediction: a new marketplace emerges, built for agents. Want your agent to use Tailwind? Prisma? Pay per access.
This probably already exists in the form of MCP solutions for up to date documentation for specific libraries and so on, to mitigate hallucinations.
Either way, we need to start implementing actual solutions so we don't keep ending up with https://staltz.com/software-below-the-poverty-line.html all the time. And not just some "human contract" approach of expecting that someone will go to your docs manually and see the banner that they can give you money for more bells and whistles or something. To me, that feels like wishful thinking.
AI or not, people's work should be rewarded and that needs some sort of standardization - and I hold that view even in regards to answering feature requests on GitHub, like if someone demands something, they should immediately have the option to place money into an escrow for when/if a solution is presented to them (or get the money back if not). If they don't, you have no obligation to help them unless from the goodness of your own heart and the innate desire to do so. Similarly, if I use 10 libraries, I should be able to say "Okay I have 50 bucks, I want to donate to all of these projects by executing a single npm command and confirming a PayPal payment or something."
Incidentally, that's also the first step towards building the Torment Nexus (capitalist incentives will find a way to turn this into a hellscape), but go figure.
Just because AI is "taking advantage" of projects being open source doesn’t mean the solution is direct closed source. Going with the most direct solution to a problem is an indication you might not have spent time thinking deeper about the problem
> I've contributed millions of lines of carefully written OSS code over the past decade
I have never tracked my own output, but I would be surprised if I have written even a single million lines of code, let alone several.
Out of curiosity, is this common? Have people here actually written millions of lines of code themselves? Even assuming two million lines over thirty years, that still averages to around 180 lines per day, every day. It is doable but it is a very high level of sustained output.
I am not doubting the OP. Just noting that this represents an extraordinary amount of coding by any measure.
Including all those other excluded things, I could see a million per decade across all languages and personal/work projects pretty easily for myself.
AI is perfect for writing CSS because you can tell it your intent and it does it.
There just is not the need for frameworks/libs to make it less complex.
It's quite ironic that they used an LLM to write or at least entirely re-format their post, when their topic is about the impact these systems have on the ongoing sustainability of the humans behind the work.
I personally don't use LLMs and generative models, I find their output way too untrustworthy and their practice of mining the data of others unsettling. Not that anything on the internet can be inherently trusted anyway.
OSS was exploited by hyperscalers to build trillion-dollar industries atop of, but without ever suitably compensating, the creators of much of those tools for their work or sharing in the profit. Before AI, the community was already at a breaking point between private enterprise spouting “supply chain” bullshit at them to demand fixes and attention, or steamrolled small devs to prop up a big corp’s trademark or product, all the while never actually paying enough for the proper development and support of those products - look at NPM (leftpad and kik) as prime examples. Now you have these same big tech ghouls scraping small sites into oblivion with hostile bots, making token predictors that are deliberately engineered to never, ever direct someone to a primary source or site except as an absolute last resort (to keep folks “in app” for engagement metrics), and openly pitching AI coding agents as replacements for human coders forever.
In that context, it’s no fucking wonder that the OSS community is becoming increasingly hostile to the very norms that have left most of them broke and increasingly destitute. Hell, for up-and-coming devs emerging from bootcamps, the mantra of “contribute to OSS” makes zero sense in a Capitalist marketplace that’s pivoting hard towards AI-as-human-replacement; as the OP points out, why bother training your own replacement?
OSS won’t die, but this is a particularly painful chapter that emphasizes it cannot support itself through the (non-existent) generosity of Capital. Alternate funding schemes and organization models are needed to prepare and support it for the future, be they government grants, Academia sponsors, or outright Gov-funded Private or Public Corporations (e.g., BBC, Corporation for Public Broadcasting (RIP), etc). Updates to OSS licensing schemes barring use-cases or with more substantial teeth for commercial use are also needed, toeing the line between empowering users of general computing and extracting reasonable payments from businesses or enterprises.
Yes, LLMs are all take. Yes, they bastardise the licenses and abuse the model. But they don't change why I want to use open source software. They don't change the fact that people need to keep writing it to keep receiving it.
Long story short, I think a lot fewer people are going to use Marc's software. He might be okay with the commercial realities of this (it might be a runaway success) but I think as non-developers get more acquainted with LLMs, being able to ask a bot to change how your system works is going to be more popular, not less, even if it's not the model RMS wanted.