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The zero-cost fallacy: open-source software in the agentic era

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Re: The zero-cost fallacy: open-source software in the agentic era

#71

Post by Cider9986 »

SeoFood wrote: post #66
Cider9986 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OpenCode SuperCMD Zed Typewhisper

<3

I vouched for your recent submission which was dead, might improve your account standing so it doesn't happen again.

I'm curious how you found my comment mentioning TypeWhisper.

I was also wondering about clarification about the apple speech services. Because in the app it says they are on device (I have an m series Mac latest version) but in keyboard settings in MacOS it says many things would be shared with Apple.

It's not a huge issue because I'll just use that other model, which is fantastic, but I'm curious.

Re: The zero-cost fallacy: open-source software in the agentic era

#72

Post by Chu4eeno »

phkahler wrote: post #62

Permissive licensing is a large part of the issue TFA is talking about. GPL does not have those issues. All FLOSS suffers from AI ingesting the code and being able to output work-alike programs to some extent, but for now large GPL programs - Inkscape, Firefox, VLC, Blender, FreeCAD, KiCAD, the Linux kernel, etc are all safe - none of them are permissively licensed so nobody can proprietize them (is that a word?) Unf…

> All FLOSS suffers from AI ingesting the code and being able to output work-alike programs to some extent

You can also just set some LLM in a loop up with objdump and a C compiler and "copyright-wash" work-alikes of any proprietary software out there. Can't wait for someone to start burning tokens on doing it to baseband firmware and watch everyone who cheered on the non-GPL chardet (plus regulators) squirm.

Re: The zero-cost fallacy: open-source software in the agentic era

#73

Post by inigyou »

overgard wrote: post #37
zcw100 wrote: post #20

People need to stop yelling "Slop!" all the time and saying silly things like "every line of code was reviewed by a human". First, it's ridiculous. There is no possible way to verify that claim, determine what was or wasn't done after reviewing it, and there's no reason to review every single line. It's performative. I have a ton of stuff I haven't bothered contributing. Why? So I can deal with all the hate? When it…

It's not performative though. Slop is a burden. I'm sorry you feel excluded by that, but an AI generated PR is not of much value. The maintainer could just as easily do that, if that's what they wanted. Plus lets be realistic about why people contribute slop PRs, it's not for the betterment of the project usually, it's because they either want credit for a "contribution" they didn't bother to make themselves (If you…

It's an underrated point that providing LLM output to someone else is worthless because if they wanted it, they could put in the same input.

Re: The zero-cost fallacy: open-source software in the agentic era

#74

Post by folkrav »

jaxn wrote: post #70
robotmaxtron wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

imho the prompt is part of a "design", not a build artifact (unless your build system is weird). a deterministic build system for prompts is a called a compiler.

they are saying the prompt is the source, the code is the artifact. I think it is a valid comparison. when reviewing a PR, I do want to see the prompt(s) that generated the change.

My latest feature was an overarching change across 4 different stacks, about a full work day of going back and forth iterating on different designs, generating workarounds for stack/language specific quirks and the business' usage patterns. Multiple fresh agent sessions, review passes, exploratory work with subagents, etc. "The prompt(s) that generated the change" in that context is multiple hours of discussion, Q&A, refactoring and feedback. Is that really the value, pages and pages of reactive prompting?

Re: The zero-cost fallacy: open-source software in the agentic era

#75

Post by ColdStream »

whstl wrote: post #59
matheusmoreira wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah. Manufacturers are simultaneously pricing and locking us out of silicon. Computers are moving back to big iron tier mainframes, and it looks like remote attestation is the future so any non-corporate owned device will be essentially useless. Free software doesn't matter if we can't run it, or if we're ostracized from digital society should we figure out how to run it. Everything that everyone who believed in fre…

This is doubly bad with, in some cases, governments, banks and other institutions pretty much forcing us to own those locked-in devices to run their apps.

Personally it is looking like I will have a device like that to do those few things, and another that I can actually control, well at least until the signal leave the device.

Re: The zero-cost fallacy: open-source software in the agentic era

#76

Post by ColdStream »

matheusmoreira wrote: post #51
pixl97 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think the battle will be in open source software... I think it will be in hardware at our current rate. There has been ever increasing consolidation in the hardware world along with an ever growing acceptance of restrictions by the public 'for our safety'.

Yeah. Manufacturers are simultaneously pricing and locking us out of silicon. Computers are moving back to big iron tier mainframes, and it looks like remote attestation is the future so any non-corporate owned device will be essentially useless. Free software doesn't matter if we can't run it, or if we're ostracized from digital society should we figure out how to run it. Everything that everyone who believed in fre…

This is why I hope more people start to get behind the 'Perma computing' movement.

https://permacomputing.net/

Even if you don't agree with the exact political stances of the authors, the broad goals are notable.

I have said it for years now, perma-computing is the missing piece of the free software movement. There is no point in the software being complete free/open if you have hardware that is locked down.

Maybe one day, we will be fabing our computers, maybe not on a garage scale but on a much more local manufacturer scale. Similar to how you can get PCB's custom made but with open processor designs. Nothing too amazing but if you could pick or supply a chip design and have something made on a 300nm node or whatever, that is still a lot of power to the people. Chips that top out at a few million transistors not billion/trillions.

You can do computing up to the level of the mid 90's, which is neat but that is the big trade off you need to make.

Re: The zero-cost fallacy: open-source software in the agentic era

#77

Post by ColdStream »

krupan wrote: post #43

"One participant at the retreat noted that permissive licensing was a profound collective mistake, serving as a legal mechanism that enabled the world’s largest corporations to cannibalize volunteer labor..." Agreed. Linux and GNU did and still do so well because of the GPL. Red Hat built a billion dollar business on GPL software. Tons of Linux developers are payed great salaries by competing corporations that otherw…

It is amazing how the GPL has inadvertently held up against newer technologies that they couldn't conceive of or just didn't think were a big issue at the time.

Also, you can make propitiatory changes if it is contained within the business. Once you make them public is when there is an issue. But I doubt folks would be wanting to keep patching in their proprietary stuff with every new Linux kernel for instance.

Re: The zero-cost fallacy: open-source software in the agentic era

#78

Post by ColdStream »

phkahler wrote: post #63
bitbasher wrote: post #9

I recently read Eric Raymond’s The Cathedral and the Bazaar. It was oddly sad to read. The enthusiasm and optimistic view of open source and the future of software and craftsmanship. Looking at it in 2026.. incredibly sad. Forget the bazaar. Back to the cathedral.

Yeah Eric Raymond and open source were a bad move. Should have stuck to Free Software - as in GPL license. All that open source stuff was deliberately made corporation-friendly, which is not what's in the best interest of the code.

Yep, they took the eye off the ball. Instead of growing free software the harder but much more resilient way, they caved to corporations in the name of quick results. But those quick results have ultimately back fired on them a little.

Open source is huge now but it has lost a lot of the enthusiasm. Much of it feels like just putting out code waiting to be absorbed by some larger parasitic entity that has a marketing team.

Unfortunately, corporate doesn't like the word ethics.

It was funny when GPL 3 came along and it completely leveled the playing field so that they couldn't just take code and not allow modified execution on their devices. Apple suck on GPL2 2008 release GNU tooling for over a decade until they could build alternatives. That they would rather reinvent the wheel than let people use their own software was wild!

Same thing happened when they stripped out the ethics from veganism to make 'plant based diets'. It worked for a while but without the ethics based foundations it just couldn't last.

Re: The zero-cost fallacy: open-source software in the agentic era

#80

Post by ColdStream »

jaggederest wrote: post #68
arjie wrote: post #35

The promise of free software was that you, as a user, were not constrained by the software someone else wrote. You could modify it to see fit. Today, I can replicate most software that way. So the promise is more realized than before. The actual code is useful, yes, because it means I don't have to have it written but if it didn't exist I'd still get there. The copyright and IP maximalism approaches aren't important…

I honestly wonder about what percentage of the toxicity of society is a result of the awful copyright regime. Certainly another good chunk is a result of the patent system being broken. I guess these are not the top items in the societal problems list, but they really don't help.

It is odd when you see people freaking out about copyright and patents when they typically have neither of those things personally. They advocate for the intellectual prison.

Not the worst thing society has done but it does end up positioning people as being convinced that they must be beholden to corporations wants.

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