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Coding agents could make free software matter again

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Re: Coding agents could make free software matter again

#101

Post by apatheticonion »

rpdillon wrote: post #94
apatheticonion wrote: post #21

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 redu…

My personal take is that LLMs are so transformative that they are likely not going to qualify under derivative works and therefore GPL wouldn't hold sway. There's already some evidence that courts will consider training on copyrighted material fair use, so long as it is otherwise obtained legally, which would be the case with software licensed under GPL. I realize this is an unpopular opinion on HN, but I believe it…

I wonder if that would extend to training LLMs on decompiled firmware. A new clean room method unlocked?

Re: Coding agents could make free software matter again

#102

Post by dbetteridge »

not_paid_by_yt wrote: post #98
dbetteridge wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$700 a day of tokens can't possibly be sustainable right? That's 2X the salary of a lot of the world's software developers

and that's at the VC funded discount rate I would presume, not even true cost of those tokens without any profit.

Yeah that's the thing making my head spin, tack a 30% profit margin on that and it's 550usd per day? Probably going to be more than that for rocketship growth and investor expectations.

Is that the game? Lock in companies to this "new reality" with cheap tokens then once they fire all their devs, bait and switch to 2X the cost.

Re: Coding agents could make free software matter again

#103

Post by lowsong »

I worry people are lacking context about how SaaS products are purchased if they think LLMs and "vibe coding" are going to replace them. It's almost never the feature set. Often it's capex vs opex budgeting (i.e., it's easier to get approval for a monthly cost than a upfront capital cost) but the biggest one is liability.

Companies buy these contracts for support and to have a throat to choke if things go wrong. It doesn't matter how much you pay your AI vendor, if you use their product to "vibe code" a SaaS replacement and it fails in some way and you lose a bunch of money/time/customers/reputation/whatever, then that's on you.

This is as much a political consideration as a financial one. If you're a C-suite and you let your staff make something (LLM generated or not) and it gets compromised then you're the one who signed off on the risky project and it's your ass on the line. If you buy a big established SaaS, do your compliance due-diligence (SOC2, ISO27001, etc.), and they get compromised then you were just following best practice. Coding agents don't change this.

The truth is that the people making the choice about what to buy or build are usually not the people using the end result. If someone down the food chain had to spend a bunch of time with "brittle hacks" to make their workflow work, they're not going to care at all. All they want is the minimum possible to meet whatever the requirement is, that isn't going to come back to bite them later.

SaaS isn't about software, it's about shifting blame.

Re: Coding agents could make free software matter again

#104

Post by tmtvl »

phendrenad2 wrote: post #83

The debate in the comment section here really boils down to: upstream freedom vs downstream freedom. Copyleft licenses like GPL/Apache mandate upstream freedom: Upstream has the "freedom" to use anything downstream, including anything written by a corporation. Non-copyleft FOSS licenses like MIT/BSD are about downstream freedom, which is more of a philosophically utilitarian view, where anyone who receives the softwa…

What you call 'downstream freedom' isn't very downstream. The real downstream is the end user, who should have the right to know what the software is doing on their computer, to recompile the software so it works on their machine with the software that is already on it, to make changes to the software so it can serve their needs.

Re: Coding agents could make free software matter again

#105

Post by zar1048576 »

I wonder if there will be a different phenomena — namely everyone just developing their own personal version of what they want rather than relying on what someone else built. Nowadays, if the core functionality is straightforward enough, I find that I just end up building it myself so I can tailor it to my exact needs. It takes less time than trying to understand and adapt someone else’s code base, especially if it’s (mostly) AI generated and contains a great deal of code slop.

Re: Coding agents could make free software matter again

#107

Post by roncesvalles »

threethirtytwo wrote: post #66
coffeefirst wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This isn’t going to happen. I can already build a ticket tracker in a weekend. I’ve been on many teams that used Jira, nobody loves Jira, none of us ever bothered to DIY something good enough. Why? Because it’s a massive distraction. It’s really fun to build all these side apps, but then you have to maintain them. I’m guessing a lot of vibeware will be abandoned rather than maintained.

Who said you’re building it? You’re telling your AI to build it while you go play golf or something.

That's not how anything works.

Re: Coding agents could make free software matter again

#108

Post by jongjong »

What I'm hoping for is for more competition in the tech sector. I'm tired of companies foisting Microsoft or Oracle products on everyone! WTF! The current tech sector feels like all companies are subsidiaries of Big Tech... It's likely a direct result of passive investing... Everyone who has any money and controls a small or medium sized company likely owns stock of Microsoft, Apple, Meta, Google, Amazon... So they mandate their companies to use products from those big tech companies. So all the small-fish founders feel like they are dogfooding their own investments... And that's preventing new entrants from getting a foothold in B2B space... Feels like all the small companies are working for Big Tech.

Conflict of interests is the norm. It should be illegal for a company founder or director to own stock of a supplier. It should be illegal for shareholders to own stocks of two competing companies. Index funds should be illegal.

Re: Coding agents could make free software matter again

#109

Post by apatheticonion »

dbetteridge wrote: post #91
apatheticonion wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AUD* - so $450 USD But yes, that's very expensive and surprising to me.

Ah a fellow Aussie, hi! Sorry to hear about the redundancy (Atlassian?). I did implicitly assume USD but yeah still crazy cash, that'd pay for 2 junior-mid level devs in aus D=

G'day, haha.

Yeah Atlassian. 1/3rd of my team were given the boot sadly. One guy had 12 years at the company - crazy times

Re: Coding agents could make free software matter again

#110

Post by Mengkudulangsat »

zar1048576 wrote: post #105

I wonder if there will be a different phenomena — namely everyone just developing their own personal version of what they want rather than relying on what someone else built. Nowadays, if the core functionality is straightforward enough, I find that I just end up building it myself so I can tailor it to my exact needs. It takes less time than trying to understand and adapt someone else’s code base, especially if it’s…

This has been my experience as a newbie.

My prompts to Claude has evolved from "what program / data source do I need to do this" to "what program / data source do I need, to make you do this for me".

After a few iterations, any data source without a free API feed, or any program without a free CLI interface are edited out of the gene pool, so to speak.

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