Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Cal.com is going closed source

cal.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

311–320 of 337 posts

Re: Cal.com is going closed source

#311

Post by duncangh »

codytruscott wrote: post #297
runako wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They won’t, because specialization is a key aspect of capitalism. This is why companies outsource anything. Google, Inc. is big enough to own farms and ranches to grow the food eaten in its cafeterias. They could make trucks to transport that food. They could operate factories to make cutlery, etc. Why do they instead choose to pay layers of margins to layers of middlemen? Absurd example? How about Apple? They outsou…

Delta owns and operates a refinery. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trainer_Refinery https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/delta-air-lines-refi...

Lmao I love this flavor of the ‘tism that always surfaces in hn comment threads exactly like this. Like moths to a flame

Re: Cal.com is going closed source

#312

Post by mgdev »

cassianoleal wrote: post #301
mgdev wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You already do this with human-authored code, just slowly. Project model capabilities out a few years. Even if you only assume linear improvement at some point your risk-adjusted outcome lines cross each other and this becomes the preferred way of authoring code - code nobody but you ever sees. Most enterprises already HATE adopting open source. They only do it because the economic benefit of free reuse has tradition…

> You already do this with human-authored code, just slowly. No I don't. I build predictable and deterministic pipelines. If I rebuild from a specific git sha, I expect the same output. If I get something different, I need to fix what's causing that.

I can't tell if you're trolling.

Nothing precludes you from doing that with AI-gen code vs human-gen code. What you just described is downstream.

If you have a human authoring code, you re-roll every time they release a new version. AI just releases versions faster, and in response to different, faster-moving inputs.

Re: Cal.com is going closed source

#313

Post by mgdev »

jodrellblank wrote: post #259
mgdev wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You already do this with human-authored code, just slowly. Project model capabilities out a few years. Even if you only assume linear improvement at some point your risk-adjusted outcome lines cross each other and this becomes the preferred way of authoring code - code nobody but you ever sees. Most enterprises already HATE adopting open source. They only do it because the economic benefit of free reuse has tradition…

Next, you double click the Excel icon on the desktop, and instead of having Excel installed or a spec of Excel, you have a cloud service with thirty years of Usenet, Quora, StackOverflow, Reddit, PHPBB comments and blog tutorials about how people use Excel, and you wait a few moments while approximately-Excel is rederived from these experiences. You’ll accept the delay because by then it happens faster than Microsoft…

It's a mistake to confuse what you're seeing out of today's models with what you'll see out of future ones. We're barely out of the gate on this stuff. We'll borrow what works, and use it to bootstrap something better.

Re: Cal.com is going closed source

#314

Post by notnullorvoid »

jmcgough wrote: post #229
notnullorvoid wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The moat of Cal.com is not the code, it's the users who don't want to migrate. That's a very weak moat unless you have something else like the friction of network dependence similar to a social network.

idk my mom still pays for her aol email account

Email is actually a excellent example of something with network dependence. Changing email providers requires that you change your email address too (unless you own and use your own domain). An address change causes friction from having to update the network of contacts and services which used your old email address.

Re: Cal.com is going closed source

#315

Post by Gormo »

OccamsMirror wrote: post #261
eloisant wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Individuals and SMB might stick with Saas but those don't pay much. Enterprise customers have the means to develop in house, those are the customers that will leave. And those are the whales of the Saas business.

They already have the means to develop in house. Why aren't they?

They are, and always have. Looking over "software engineer" roles in my local area, I see folks at companies in a variety of industries: finance, health, logistics, health care, and the local power utility, all well outside the software industry.

Most enterprise companies don't develop everything in house, but usually do have a varied mix of in-house infrastructure, IaaS and PaaS solutions, and SaaS products. Large organizations across varied industries often have multiple internal dev teams, and the availability of increasingly sophisticated AI tools is going to enable the same teams to be effective at more, and more complex, projects. AI will definitely start shifting make-or-buy decisions, especially for mature, commodity use cases, to 'make'.

Re: Cal.com is going closed source

#316

Post by Gormo »

runako wrote: post #300
codytruscott wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Delta owns and operates a refinery. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trainer_Refinery https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/delta-air-lines-refi...

Sigh. s/Delta/United/ or s/Delta/Southwest/ or s/Delta/Lufthansa/. Or if you prefer, s/refinery/oilfield, or s/refinery/pipeline. Or even s/refinery/farm/ because Delta also buys food in vast quantities (I would not be surprised to find they have interests in ag producers that offset a small % of their food purchases, which does not diminish the argument). Delta also does not make airplanes, jet engines, seats, radio…

Vertical integration has been a common practice in industry for 150 years. Yes, very few firms fully control their upstream supply chains, but very few conversely produce nothing but their core market offering in-house. Most companies are somewhere in between, doing some things in-house, and obtaining other things from vendors.

Most large firms have in-house software dev teams responsible for at least some portion of their development work. I know software engineers locally working, variously, at banks, pet supply distributors, power companies, soft drink bottlers, and many other non-tech industries. And AI can and will extend these teams' capacity to internally manager larger segments of their companies' tech stacks.

Re: Cal.com is going closed source

#317

Post by Gormo »

theahura wrote: post #171
DrammBA wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a feeling the real reason is them trying to avoid someone using AI to copyright-wash their product, they're just using security as the excuse.

At risk of self promotion, I think more people should adopt something like the Ship of Theseus license ( https://github.com/tilework-tech/nori-skillsets/pull/465/cha... ). It's not obvious if this will patch the clean room hole in licensing, but I'd rather see it play out in court than assume opensource is just fully dead

IANAL, but I don't think there is any "clean room hole in licensing": licensing is downstream of copyright law, and clean-room reverse engineering, if done properly, results in products that do not infringe the copyright of the originating work to begin with, so the license therefore never applies to them.

The "Ship of Theseus" license you've linked to attempts to define for itself what constitutes a derivative work, but what is and is not a derivative work is determined by copyright law itself, and there's no concept of imposing licensing conditions on works that your copyright never extended to in the first place.

Simply put, if something isn't infringing your copyright under the criteria established by the law, then your permission was never needed to do it in the first place, so the conditions under which you would or would not be willing offer that permission are irrelevant.

Re: Cal.com is going closed source

#319

Post by Gormo »

simonw wrote: post #11

Drew Breunig published a very relevant piece yesterday that came to the opposite conclusion: https://www.dbreunig.com/2026/04/14/cybersecurity-is-proof-o... Since security exploits can now be found by spending tokens, open source is MORE valuable because open source libraries can share that auditing budget while closed source software has to find all the exploits themselves in private. > If Mythos continues to find e…

> > If Mythos continues to find exploits so long as you keep throwing money at it, security is reduced to a brutally simple equation: to harden a system you need to spend more tokens discovering exploits than attackers will spend exploiting them.

But this has always been the reality of security: it's always been fundamentally an economic question about which party has stronger incentives and greater resources than the other. The increasing sophistication of AI is available to both parties equally, so I don't see how AI in itself fundamentally changes the equation.

Re: Cal.com is going closed source

#320

Post by Gormo »

JoshTriplett wrote: post #118
jstummbillig wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> to harden a system you need to spend more tokens discovering exploits than attackers will spend exploiting them. That can't be right, can it? Given stable software, the relative attack surface keeps shrinking. Mythos does not produce exploits. Should be defenders advantage, token wise, no?

> Mythos does not produce exploits. AI in general will, don't worry. "Move fast and break things" makes more exploits than "move steadily and fix things" does.

But doesn't AI ultimately obviate "move fast and break things" by making it easier to move fast without breaking things?
Post reply on HN