All the infrastructure that runs the whole AI-over-the-internet juggernaut is
essentially all open source.
Heck, even Claude Code would be far less useful without grep, diff, git, head, etc., etc., etc. And one can easily see a day where something like a local sort Claude Code talking to Open Weight and Open Source models is the core dev tool.
I think the opposite. It will make all software matter less.
If trendlines continue... It will be faster for AI to vibe code said software to your customized specifications than to sign up for a SaaS and learn it.
"Claude, create a project management tool that simplifies jira, customize it to my workflow."
So a lot of apps will actually become closed source personalized builds.
Maybe, but I don't really believe users can or want to start designing software, if it was even possible which today it isn't really unless you already have software dev skills.
That would basically make users a product manager and UX designer, which they aren't really capable of currently. At most they will discover what they think they want isn't what they actually want.
It’s such a fun time to have 1+ decade(s) of experience in software. Knowing what simple and good are (for me), and being able to articulate it has let me create so much personal software for myself and my family. It has really felt like turning ideas into reality, about as fast as I can think of them or they can suggest them. And adding specific features, just for our needs. The latest one was a slack canvas replacement, as we moved from slack to self-hosted matrix + element but missed the multiplayer, persistent monthly notes file we used. Even getting matrix set up in the first place was a breeze.
$20/month with your provider of choice unlocks a lot.
Edit: the underlying point being, yes to the article. Either building upon the foundations of open source to making personal things, or just modifying a fork for my own needs.
I have a Synology NAS I can push docker images to. The key is to set up the docker image so it does a git pull on start, that way I just push to Github and restart it.
This was _incredibly_ hard to set up, in a way I did not expect, even with frontier models. It took me 3-4 evenings.
If someone can solve "Heroku for home server" it would open up a world of what HackerNews calls "home cooked" software.
tl-didn't finish but I absolutely do this already. Much of the software I use is foss and codex adjusts it to my needs. Sometimes it's really good software and I end up adding something that already exists. Whatever, tokens are free...
I’m not so sure… what I see as more likely is that coding agents will just strip parts from open source libraries to build bespoke applications for users. Users will be ecstatic because they get exactly what they want and they don’t have to worry about upstream supply chain attacks. Maintainers get screwed because no one contributes back to the main code base. In the end open source software becomes critical to the ecosystem, but gets none of the credit.
Having over a decade of open source software I've written freely available online, I actually really appreciate the value that AI && LLMs have provided me.
The thing that leaves a bad taste in my mouth is the fact that my works were likely included in the training data and, if it doesn't violate my licenses (GNU 2/3), it certainly feels against the spirit of what I intended when distributing my works.
I was made redundant recently "due to AI" (questionable) and it feels like my works in some way contributed to my redundancy where my works contributed to the profits made by these AI megacorps while I am left a victim.
I wish I could be provided a dividend or royalty, however small, for my contribution to these LLMs but that will never happen.
I've been looking for a copy-left "source available" license that allows me to distribute code openly but has a clause that says "if you would like to use these sources to train an LLM, please contact me and we'll work something out". I haven't yet found that.
I'm guessing that such a license would not be enforceable because I am not in the US, but at least it would be nice to declare my intent and who knows what the future looks like.
> I was made redundant recently "due to AI" (questionable) and it feels like my works in some way contributed to my redundancy where my works contributed to the profits made by these AI megacorps while I am left a victim.
This is increasingly common, and I don’t think it’s questionable that LLMs that software engineers help train are contributing to the obsolescence of software engineers. Large companies that operate these LLMs both 1) benefit from the huge amount of open-source software and at the same time 2) erode the very foundation that made open-source software explode in popularity (which happened thanks to copyright—or, more precisely, the ability to use copyright to enforce copyleft and thus protect the future of volunteer work made by individual contributors).
GPL was written long before this technology started to be used this way. There’s little doubt that the spirit of GPL is violated at scale by commercial LLM operators, and considering the amount of money that got sunk into this it’s very unlikely they would ever yield to the public the models, the ability to mass-scrape the entire Internet to train equivalent models, the capability to run these models to obtain comparable results, etc. The claim of “democratising knowledge” is disingenuous if you look deeper into it—somehow, they themselves will always be exempt from that democratisation and free to profit from our work, whereas our work is what gets “democratised”. Somehow, this strikes me personally more as expropriation than democratisation.
You can't avoid big corps training on your data if it's available, because "fair use".
But I hope this same 'fair use' will allow distilling of their private models into open weight models, so users are never locked in into any particular vendor. Giving back power to the user.
The other day I was working with some shaders GLSL signed distance field functions. I asked Claude to review the code and it immediately offered to replace some functions with "known solutions". Turns out those functions were basically a verbatim copy of Inigo Quilez's work.
His work is available with a permissible license on the Internet but somehow it doesn't seem right that a tool will just regurgitate someone else's work without any mention of copyright or license or original authorship.
Pre-LLM world one would at least have had to search for this information, find the site, understand the license and acknowledge who the author is. Post LLM the tool will just blatantly plagiarize someone else work which you can then sign off on as your own. Disgusting.
And even if it would be enforceable, would you be able and willing to go through the energy and monetary expenses to enforce it? Especially against a big corporation willing to fight you.
It shouldn't be needed. I would argue that is more than "against the spirit" and should not be considered fair use. Instead of creating a derivative work, they created a machine that creates derivative works.
FWIW, a lot of open source caused other people to lose their jobs too, all pre AI. So what goes around comes around. The Free Software movement was from day one built on cloning proprietary programs - UNIX was a commercial OS that AT&T sold, the early Linux desktop environments all looked exactly like a mashup of Windows 95 and commercial DEs, etc. Every commercial UNIX got wiped out except Apple, do you think that didn't lead to layoffs? Because it very much did. Nor did it ever really change. SystemD started out as "heavily inspired" by Launch Services. Wayland is basically the same ideas as SkyLight in macOS, etc.
And who was it who benefited from this stuff? A lot of the benefit went to "megacorps" who took the savings and banked the higher profits.
So I don't think open source, which for many years was unashamedly about just cloning designs that were funding other people's salaries, can really cry too much about LLMs. And I say that as someone who has written a lot of open source software, including working on Wine.
I’m impressed by how current times make us consider so many completely opposite scenarios. I think it can indeed foster progress, but it can also have negative impacts.
Unfortunately for me, I believe that the algorithms won't allow me to get exposure for my work no matter how good it is so there is literally no benefit for me to do open source. Though I would love to, I'm not in a position to work for free. Exposure is required to monetize open source. It has to reach a certain scale of adoption.
The worst part is building something open source, getting positive feedback, helping a couple of startups and then some big corporation comes along and implements a similar product and then everyone gets forced by their bosses to use the corporate product against their will and people eventually forget your product exists because there are no high-paying jobs allowing people to use it.
With hindsight, Open Source is basically a con for corporations to get free labor. When you make software free for everyone, really you're just making it free for corporations to Embrace, Extend, Extinguish... They invest a huge amount of effort to suppress the sources of the ideas.
Our entire system is heavily optimized for decoupling products from their makers. We have almost no idea who is making any of the products we buy. I believe there is a reason for that. Open source is no different.
When we lived in caves, everyone in the tribe knew who caught the fish or who speared the buffalo. They would rightly get credit. Now, it's like; because none of the rich people are doing any useful work, they can only maintain credibility by obfuscating the source of the products we buy. They do nothing but control stuff. Controlling stuff does not add value. Once a process is organized, additional control only serves to destroy value through rent extraction.
5 years ago, I set out to build an open-source, interoperable marketplace powered by open-source SaaS. It felt like a pipe dream, but AI has made the dream into fruition. People are underestimating how much AI is a threat to rent seeking middlemen in every industry.
> SaaS scaled by exploiting a licensing loophole that let vendors avoid sharing their modifications.
AI is going to exploit even more: "Given the repository -> Construct tech spec -> Build project based on tech spec"
At this stage, I want everyone just close their source, stop working on open source until this issue of licensing gets resolved.
Any improvement you make to the open source code will be leveraged in ways you didn't intend it to be used, eventually making you redundant in the process
Even worse, the AI will supply a mediocre version of the source specific to someone else's case, and not getting anything in return, ultimately choking the open source effort. The article touches on this briefly.
All I post anymore is anti-AI sentiment because it just feels like we're in a cycle of blind trust. A lot of FOSS seems cautious about LLMs for a plethora of reasons (quality and ethics among those) but we're a long way from making the tools that are supposedly going to replace us a locally runnable tool. So, until then, we're conceding pur agency to Anthropic and whoever else.
Meanwhile, war is breaking out and disrupting already stressed supply chains and manufacturing (for instance, Taiwan relies heavily on natural gas). Many manufacturers are starting to ditch production of consumer hardware, the supposed hardware folks ITT want to run their local models on. The vast majority of datacenters aren't being built yet, and those that are being built are missing their targets, still have aging GPUs in boxes without the infrastructure to power and turn them on, all while floating hundreds of billions in debt.
Surely I can't be the only one who sees the issues here? Each topic is hours of "what ifs" and a massive gamble to see if any of it will come together in a way that will be good for anyone who visits HN.
First of all, free software still matters. Then, being a slave to a $200 subscription to a oligarch application that launders other people's copyright is not what Stallman envisioned.
The AI propaganda articles are getting more devious my the minute. It's not just propaganda---it's Bernays-level manipulation!
It compares and contrasts open source and free software, and then gives an example of how free software is better than closed software.
But if the premise of the article, that the agent will take the package you pick and adapt it to your needs, is correct, then honestly the agent won't give a rat's ass whether the starting point was free source or open source.
I don’t know what SaaS has to do with FOSS. The point of FOSS was to allow me to modify the software I run on my system. If the device drivers for some hardware I depend on are no longer supported by the company I bought it from, if it’s open source, I can modify and extend the software myself.
The Copy Left licenses ensure that I share my modifications back if I distribute them. It’s a thing for the public good.
Agent-based software development walls people off from that. Mostly by ensuring that the provenance of the code it generates is not known and by deskilling people so that they don’t know what to prompt or how to fix their code.
If I look around in the FLOSS communities, I see a lot of skepticism towards LLMs. The main concerns are:
1. they were trained on FLOSS repositories without consent of the authors, including GPL and AGPL repos
2. the best models are proprietary
3. folks making low-effort contribution attempts using AI (PRs, security reports, etc).
I agree those are legitimate problems but LLMs are the new reality, they are not going to go away. Much more powerful lobbies than the OSS ones are losing fights against the LLM companies (the big copyright holders in media).
But while companies can use LLMs to build replacements for GPL licensed code (where those LLMs have that GPL code probably in their training set), the reverse thing can also be done: one can break monopolies open using LLMs, and build so much open source software using LLMs.
> LLMs are the new reality, they are not going to go away
That's the conventional wisdom, but it isn't a given. A lot of financial wizardry is taking place to prop up the best of these things, and even their most ardent proponents are starting to recognize their futility once a certain complexity level is reached. The open weight models are the stalking horse that gives this proposition the most legs, but it's not given that Anthropic and OpenAI exist as anything more than shells of their current selves in 5 years.
agree completely. When the megacorps are building hundreds of datacenters and openly talking about plans to charge for software "like a utility," there has never been a clearer mandate for the need for FOSS, and IMO there has never been as much momentum behind it either.
these are exciting times, that are coming despite any pessimism rooted in our out-dated software paradigms.
89 comments
[ 1.7 ms ] story [ 64.5 ms ] threadAll the infrastructure that runs the whole AI-over-the-internet juggernaut is essentially all open source.
Heck, even Claude Code would be far less useful without grep, diff, git, head, etc., etc., etc. And one can easily see a day where something like a local sort Claude Code talking to Open Weight and Open Source models is the core dev tool.
If trendlines continue... It will be faster for AI to vibe code said software to your customized specifications than to sign up for a SaaS and learn it.
"Claude, create a project management tool that simplifies jira, customize it to my workflow."
So a lot of apps will actually become closed source personalized builds.
That would basically make users a product manager and UX designer, which they aren't really capable of currently. At most they will discover what they think they want isn't what they actually want.
$20/month with your provider of choice unlocks a lot.
Edit: the underlying point being, yes to the article. Either building upon the foundations of open source to making personal things, or just modifying a fork for my own needs.
This was _incredibly_ hard to set up, in a way I did not expect, even with frontier models. It took me 3-4 evenings.
If someone can solve "Heroku for home server" it would open up a world of what HackerNews calls "home cooked" software.
The thing that leaves a bad taste in my mouth is the fact that my works were likely included in the training data and, if it doesn't violate my licenses (GNU 2/3), it certainly feels against the spirit of what I intended when distributing my works.
I was made redundant recently "due to AI" (questionable) and it feels like my works in some way contributed to my redundancy where my works contributed to the profits made by these AI megacorps while I am left a victim.
I wish I could be provided a dividend or royalty, however small, for my contribution to these LLMs but that will never happen.
I've been looking for a copy-left "source available" license that allows me to distribute code openly but has a clause that says "if you would like to use these sources to train an LLM, please contact me and we'll work something out". I haven't yet found that.
I'm guessing that such a license would not be enforceable because I am not in the US, but at least it would be nice to declare my intent and who knows what the future looks like.
This is increasingly common, and I don’t think it’s questionable that LLMs that software engineers help train are contributing to the obsolescence of software engineers. Large companies that operate these LLMs both 1) benefit from the huge amount of open-source software and at the same time 2) erode the very foundation that made open-source software explode in popularity (which happened thanks to copyright—or, more precisely, the ability to use copyright to enforce copyleft and thus protect the future of volunteer work made by individual contributors).
GPL was written long before this technology started to be used this way. There’s little doubt that the spirit of GPL is violated at scale by commercial LLM operators, and considering the amount of money that got sunk into this it’s very unlikely they would ever yield to the public the models, the ability to mass-scrape the entire Internet to train equivalent models, the capability to run these models to obtain comparable results, etc. The claim of “democratising knowledge” is disingenuous if you look deeper into it—somehow, they themselves will always be exempt from that democratisation and free to profit from our work, whereas our work is what gets “democratised”. Somehow, this strikes me personally more as expropriation than democratisation.
But I hope this same 'fair use' will allow distilling of their private models into open weight models, so users are never locked in into any particular vendor. Giving back power to the user.
His work is available with a permissible license on the Internet but somehow it doesn't seem right that a tool will just regurgitate someone else's work without any mention of copyright or license or original authorship.
Pre-LLM world one would at least have had to search for this information, find the site, understand the license and acknowledge who the author is. Post LLM the tool will just blatantly plagiarize someone else work which you can then sign off on as your own. Disgusting.
And who was it who benefited from this stuff? A lot of the benefit went to "megacorps" who took the savings and banked the higher profits.
So I don't think open source, which for many years was unashamedly about just cloning designs that were funding other people's salaries, can really cry too much about LLMs. And I say that as someone who has written a lot of open source software, including working on Wine.
The worst part is building something open source, getting positive feedback, helping a couple of startups and then some big corporation comes along and implements a similar product and then everyone gets forced by their bosses to use the corporate product against their will and people eventually forget your product exists because there are no high-paying jobs allowing people to use it.
With hindsight, Open Source is basically a con for corporations to get free labor. When you make software free for everyone, really you're just making it free for corporations to Embrace, Extend, Extinguish... They invest a huge amount of effort to suppress the sources of the ideas.
Our entire system is heavily optimized for decoupling products from their makers. We have almost no idea who is making any of the products we buy. I believe there is a reason for that. Open source is no different.
When we lived in caves, everyone in the tribe knew who caught the fish or who speared the buffalo. They would rightly get credit. Now, it's like; because none of the rich people are doing any useful work, they can only maintain credibility by obfuscating the source of the products we buy. They do nothing but control stuff. Controlling stuff does not add value. Once a process is organized, additional control only serves to destroy value through rent extraction.
AI is going to exploit even more: "Given the repository -> Construct tech spec -> Build project based on tech spec"
At this stage, I want everyone just close their source, stop working on open source until this issue of licensing gets resolved.
Any improvement you make to the open source code will be leveraged in ways you didn't intend it to be used, eventually making you redundant in the process
All I post anymore is anti-AI sentiment because it just feels like we're in a cycle of blind trust. A lot of FOSS seems cautious about LLMs for a plethora of reasons (quality and ethics among those) but we're a long way from making the tools that are supposedly going to replace us a locally runnable tool. So, until then, we're conceding pur agency to Anthropic and whoever else.
Meanwhile, war is breaking out and disrupting already stressed supply chains and manufacturing (for instance, Taiwan relies heavily on natural gas). Many manufacturers are starting to ditch production of consumer hardware, the supposed hardware folks ITT want to run their local models on. The vast majority of datacenters aren't being built yet, and those that are being built are missing their targets, still have aging GPUs in boxes without the infrastructure to power and turn them on, all while floating hundreds of billions in debt.
Surely I can't be the only one who sees the issues here? Each topic is hours of "what ifs" and a massive gamble to see if any of it will come together in a way that will be good for anyone who visits HN.
The AI propaganda articles are getting more devious my the minute. It's not just propaganda---it's Bernays-level manipulation!
It compares and contrasts open source and free software, and then gives an example of how free software is better than closed software.
But if the premise of the article, that the agent will take the package you pick and adapt it to your needs, is correct, then honestly the agent won't give a rat's ass whether the starting point was free source or open source.
I don’t know what SaaS has to do with FOSS. The point of FOSS was to allow me to modify the software I run on my system. If the device drivers for some hardware I depend on are no longer supported by the company I bought it from, if it’s open source, I can modify and extend the software myself.
The Copy Left licenses ensure that I share my modifications back if I distribute them. It’s a thing for the public good.
Agent-based software development walls people off from that. Mostly by ensuring that the provenance of the code it generates is not known and by deskilling people so that they don’t know what to prompt or how to fix their code.
1. they were trained on FLOSS repositories without consent of the authors, including GPL and AGPL repos
2. the best models are proprietary
3. folks making low-effort contribution attempts using AI (PRs, security reports, etc).
I agree those are legitimate problems but LLMs are the new reality, they are not going to go away. Much more powerful lobbies than the OSS ones are losing fights against the LLM companies (the big copyright holders in media).
But while companies can use LLMs to build replacements for GPL licensed code (where those LLMs have that GPL code probably in their training set), the reverse thing can also be done: one can break monopolies open using LLMs, and build so much open source software using LLMs.
In the end, the GPL is only a means to an end.
Let me know when you succeed.
> the GPL is only a means to an end
And how this end is closer with LLMs?
That's the conventional wisdom, but it isn't a given. A lot of financial wizardry is taking place to prop up the best of these things, and even their most ardent proponents are starting to recognize their futility once a certain complexity level is reached. The open weight models are the stalking horse that gives this proposition the most legs, but it's not given that Anthropic and OpenAI exist as anything more than shells of their current selves in 5 years.
these are exciting times, that are coming despite any pessimism rooted in our out-dated software paradigms.