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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

#91

Post by magicalist »

ColdStream wrote: post #80
jaggederest wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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.

You have at least two comments in this thread lauding the GPL and its effects. So aren't you advocating for the intellectual prison as well?

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

#92

Post by lstodd »

ColdStream wrote: post #78
phkahler wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

There were ethics in veganism? Since when? It was always a religious movement, all the way back to Vedanta. A way to set yourself apart and then maybe feel better for not being "like those others".

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

#93

Post by physix »

I think the article is really good, until it starts to offer guidance and making suggestions for the future.

I can't pin it down precisely, but my feeling is that it doesn't fully recognize the fundamental shift taking place. In a sense it's not radical enough, trying more to keep a system afloat whose foundation is being dismantled.

The forces that gave rise to open source will find a new way, because they are based on the nature of the human spirit. We just don't know what it will look like yet.

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

#94

Post by mahirsaid »

Just to mention the hosting of open-source software that isn't reliable. This not only creates a level of uncertainty, but causes lack of trust. The systems a whole is becoming neglected. Microsoft v=benefited from numerous open-source software, yet all there worried about is their subscriptions.

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

#95

Post by henry_bone »

ColdStream wrote: post #76
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 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 on…

From that link:-

"With that said, permacomputing is an anti-capitalist political project. It is driven by several strands of anarchism, decoloniality, intersectional feminism, post-marxism, degrowth, ecologism."

They are post-modernist, collectivist, marxist. I couldn't get behind that.

That ideology is arguably the most destructive in human history.

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

#96

Post by socalgal2 »

> For years, the software engineering industry has operated on a comfortable, perhaps lazy, myth: that open source software is an infinite, self-renewing public good that costs nothing to consume and requires nothing to sustain.

This is provably false and wish that sentiment would die

Microsoft spends at least $600-$800 million on open source The make VS Code, .NET/C#, Edge, TypeScript. They provide free hosting, free CIs, free issues, discussions, free webpages (github). Google spends similar amounts on Chromium, Angular, Go, Flutter, Gemma, etc...

Meta spends similar amounts on React, PyTorch, Presto, Llama

Amazon sends 200-300 million on valkey, OpenSearch, FireCracker, and has dedicated engineers for Kubernetes, PostgreSQL, MariaDB, and Rust

Apple provide swift, WebKit, Clang/LLVM - there spending is also in the 100-200 million range.

That's on top of employees at almost all of those companies fixing bugs and providing patches for everything they use.

People make up the claims like the OP with zero actual evidence.

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

#97

Post by quantummagic »

inigyou wrote: post #73
overgard wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Forming the prompt is still a skill, tokens aren't free, and it all takes some time and attention, which also has a price. So someone else doing that for you isn't exactly worthless, if they do a good job of it.

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

#99

Post by markhahn »

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.

uh-huh. and what source code do you think coding models are trained on?

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

#100

Post by jaxn »

folkrav wrote: post #74
jaxn wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

Yes. Because that is where the intent is/was. In the future, as more changes are made, having the history of the intent is helpful context. And in that back and forth there are also details of what you didn't want, and why. Some of that can be captured in decision docs, etc.

when devs work in isolation, that context/memory is siloed. Same is true when working across platforms (codex, claude, etc).

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