All my new code will be closed-source from now on

I think it’s rather that people need to eat. He admits that some wealthy devs will continue to work for free (do charity basically) but for those who want to make a living from OSS it will be harder and harder.

But yea as you said ultimately it probably won’t matter that much.

I never had the time or understanding to setup a business around it, so in the end I just got rid of everything. No more open source unless it’s purely for my own enjoyment.

I’m VERY appreciative of free and open source projects and organizations that don’t try to make money. The FSF, GNU, Linux- I love these! I would love if the world just focused on these! I would use a Linux desktop and phone if they were in that Apple sweetspot (iOS 26 not included) of ease for techs and non-techs.

What I’ve noticed about successful open-source projects is that they have:

- a strong leader, who has dedicated their life to it, not as a secondary initiative, and who one day knows they must hand the reins to another

- a willing team that continues to bring in “new meat”

- a project that sells itself by filling a need that will remain for some time by many

- no need or desire for money

Those that end in failure involve:

- a leader/team that sees it as part-time volunteer work, and they do it because it makes them feel good about themselves; they are giving back

- the assumption that one day maybe they’ll get paid

So what are the actual solutions, now that the cat is out of the bag?

Much like in the post, you could make it source available and have a free license for non-profits and development, but ask money for commercial usage, or different feature sets (like iframe-resizer, which we recently bought for a project, saved a bunch of time, but the AI models still were trained on it and knew how to use it). Or provide support, like many FOSS DBs and OSes should, same for libraries, maybe to have PostgreSQL dethrone Oracle and the likes just a little bit more.

Or maybe some ask-for-funding stuff defined at library level with the expectation that the AIs would present this information to whoever uses them. I don't particularly celebrate https://docs.npmjs.com/cli/v9/commands/npm-fund but I get why it's there - similarly we might get IDE plugins and CLI tools and such to present a summary of what libraries or projects were used/suggested in a task/chat session and how to give them money, much like how you'd get references to website sources when trying to ask AI to research something.

> My prediction: a new marketplace emerges, built for agents. Want your agent to use Tailwind? Prisma? Pay per access.

This probably already exists in the form of MCP solutions for up to date documentation for specific libraries and so on, to mitigate hallucinations.

Either way, we need to start implementing actual solutions so we don't keep ending up with https://staltz.com/software-below-the-poverty-line.html all the time. And not just some "human contract" approach of expecting that someone will go to your docs manually and see the banner that they can give you money for more bells and whistles or something. To me, that feels like wishful thinking.

AI or not, people's work should be rewarded and that needs some sort of standardization - and I hold that view even in regards to answering feature requests on GitHub, like if someone demands something, they should immediately have the option to place money into an escrow for when/if a solution is presented to them (or get the money back if not). If they don't, you have no obligation to help them unless from the goodness of your own heart and the innate desire to do so. Similarly, if I use 10 libraries, I should be able to say "Okay I have 50 bucks, I want to donate to all of these projects by executing a single npm command and confirming a PayPal payment or something."

Incidentally, that's also the first step towards building the Torment Nexus (capitalist incentives will find a way to turn this into a hellscape), but go figure.

In the end product is being sold originally to fund that development. Software can also be pure product enabling company to do something or consumer to do something. But in that case open-source is likely incidental. Not the product.