Good, coding harnesses should be open source and LLMs should be treated as commodities. Minimize switching costs for consumers, and let people understand how they're interacting with the context and the LLM outputs. The industry has been moving the wrong direction with Claude Code staying closed (despite multiple times leaking the source code!) and the open source Gemini CLI being deprecated in favor of closed source…
Why would a company do any of these things? What is their motivation for any of it? That’s like saying cloud providers should be commodity and should open source all of their platforms and eliminate egress fees so customers can easily leave at any point in time. That’s a charity, not a business model.
> That’s a charity, not a business model.
Joel Spolsky in 2002 identified a major pattern in technology business & economics: The pattern of "commoditizing your complement", an alternative to vertical integration, where companies seek to secure a choke point or quasi-monopoly in products composed of many necessary & sufficient layers by dominating one layer while fostering so much competition in another layer above or below its layer that no competing monopolist can emerge, prices are driven down to marginal costs elsewhere in the stack, total price drops & increases demand, and the majority of the consumer surplus of the final product can be diverted to the quasi-monopolist.
No matter how valuable the original may be and how much one could charge for it, it can be more valuable to make it free if it increases profits elsewhere.
This pattern explains many otherwise odd or apparently self-sabotaging ventures by large tech companies into apparently irrelevant fields, such as the high rate of releasing open-source contributions by many Internet companies or the intrusion of advertising companies into smartphone manufacturing & web browser development & statistical software & fiber-optic networks & municipal WiFi & radio spectrum auctions & DNS: they are pre-emptive attempts to commodify another company elsewhere in the stack, or defenses against it being done to them.