Open Source Isn't Dead

This is happening quite a lot actually. People just feed an existing project into their agent harness and have it regenerate more or less the same with a few tweaks and then they publish it.

I'm not sure how this works in the legal sense. A human could ostensibly study an existing project and then rewrite it from scratch. The original work's license shouldn't apply as long as code wasn't copy & pasted, right?

What happens when an automated tool does the same? It's basically just a complicated copy & paste job.

Yes, the current meta for ctfs, which includes challenges for exploiting binaries, is to just throw an LLM at it.

"Open Source Isn't Dead."

Well ...

Open Source as such will never "die", but we only need to look at what happened in, say, the last 5 or 10 years. Private entities with a commercial interest, have been flexing their muscles. Microsoft - also known as Microslop these days - with Github is probably the most famous example still, but you can see other examples. One that annoys me personally is Shopify's recent influence - rubygems.org is basically just shopifygems.org now. See: https://blog.rubygems.org/2026/04/15/rubygems-org-has-a-publ...

"Contributors from both the RubyGems client team and Shopify are already working with us on making native gems a better experience for the Ruby community. "

There is a lot more I could add to this (see my complaint about how rubygems.org hijacks gems past the 100.000 download barrier; this was why I retired from using rubygems.org, and then the year afterwards ruby core purged numerous developers. The handwriting is soooooo clear that shopify flexed their muscles here).

I think we need to make open source development more accessible to everyone, not just corporations throwing their money to gain influence and leverage. I don't have a great idea to make this model work; economic incentives kind of have to be there too, I get that part, and I am not sure which models could work. But right now we really have a big problem. We can also see this with age sniffing (age verification - see the article that pointed at Meta at orchestrating influence and lobbyism) and many more changes. Something has to change. Hopefully some people cleverer than me can come up with models that are actually sustainable, even if it may not necessarily be a "fund an open source developer for a year". There could be a more wide-spread "achieve xyz" or some other lower finance effort - but again, I don't have a good suggestion here. Hopfully something improves here though, because I am getting really tired of private interests constantly sabotaging and ruining the whole ecosystem while claiming they do "improve" an ecosystem. We have the old "War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength." going again. Opposite day, every day.

Is it good marketing though? I mean personally I do not use AI, and I don't think this opinion of mine will change. I can't look into the future, but right now I don't use nor do I depend on AI. I guess it may work for some people, but even then I am unsure whether that is really good marketing. Riding on a hype train (which AI right now still is) is indeed easier, so that has to be considered.

AI assisted decompiling has been a thing for a while now, from what I know most people are using assisted tooling for it.

With that said it at least seems possible to be able to be able to read binary itself, but most of the magic there is in execution, so you'd have to have an LLM behave kind of like a processor I think.