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

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

#81

Post by ffsm8 »

Havoc wrote: post #76

>If you want to use my libraries (1M+ downloads/month) in the future, you have to pay. Problem with this is demand like that can vanish once you paygate it.

Even more relevant is the rationale behind it.

Unless your closed source code will be usable by llms more effectively then what's available today in oss, it's likely going to die off within the next decade or two.

There will continue to be a need for software developers for the foreseeable future, but the market will continue to trend toward more and more LLM generated code - no matter how this is seen by us developers.

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

#83

Post by conartist6 »

hsbauauvhabzb wrote: post #50
conartist6 wrote: post #21

I'm writing OSS code with the intent to replace git. I know my position is very different, but to me openness is not a critical vulnerability when facing big companies but my secret weapon. For me the best outcome is taking over all the market currently held by git and GitHub, and the worst outcome would be that Microsoft somehow pulls an embrace-extend-extinguish on us. But my goal, and I think I've been successful…

Microsoft could probably look to run things like GitHub at a loss, picking up equity via their integrations and leveraging any data customers publish on GitHub to ingest into their own AI or sell to others.

Sure, but if I wanted to I could also look to run at a loss for pretty much the same reasons. In either case it's a (profit-motivated) strategy to capture and hold a critical market.

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

#84

Post by peepee1982 »

diego_moita wrote: post #8
elbci wrote: post #2

Luddite: We need to destroy these mechanical looms that are taking all our jobs leaving us homeless and hungry Marx: Did it occurred to you to destroy the system that make robots doing your job a bad thing?

And both of them failed. Both the machines and "the system" are alive and well. Did it occurred to you that you're using machines (computers, internet, HN) created by the system to complain about the system? The bitter truth is that we don't have any good alternative for both the machines and "the system". For Luddites' and Marxists' chagrin, manual weaving was indeed a crappy job and "the system" brought what they'd…

It is honestly depressing how many people have swallowed the capitalist pill so completely. Most people can't even fathom a world where cooperation actually works better than a cutthroat rat race.

It leads to these total room-temperature takes that the system is the only reason we have the internet or Hacker News. It is exhausting watching people parrot the same old clichés because they are too lazy to actually crack a history book.

The truth is that foundational tech was almost never market-driven. The architecture of the computer, the internet, and the Web were all products of the public commons. They were created by people motivated by discovery and utility rather than exit liquidity. Capital did not invent these things. It just showed up late, threw a fence around them, and started charging rent on human ingenuity it had nothing to do with.

Same goes for the Luddites. They were not anti-machine, they were just anti-starvation. They did not hate the loom. They hated that the loom was being used as a legal weapon to gut their labor rights while the owners hoarded 100 percent of the gains.

Using a computer to call this out is not hypocrisy. It is using a tool that was stolen from the human commons to argue for its return. If you think we owe our progress to the current ownership model, you are not paying attention. You have just been programmed by the marketing.

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

#85

Post by RealityVoid »

nothercastle wrote: post #34
moltar wrote: post #3

This is a foreign position to me. I open sourced my code not to make money but because I saw that others can benefit from it. I never made money from open source. If I did my mental model would be that these are charitable donations, not an income stream I can rely on.

The problem is that’s ai is monetizing your code And not giving you anything

So? If some other riser used my code to make money sould I be upset? Isn't it the whole point to me useful to others?

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

#86

Post by peepee1982 »

diego_moita wrote: post #71
vidarh wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whether you think it possible or not, this take misunderstands Marxism at a fundamental level. For Marxists, automation is a good thing - in fact it is a core precondition of socialism. Marx spent half the first chapter of the Communist Manifesto fanboying over capitalism for the productivity increases brought by capitalism. So why do you think it was to the chagrin of Marxists? Marx spent decades cheering on the adv…

Fair enough: the Chinese Marxists seem to love their robots, a lot. But, also, they handle all that automation to the capitalists. Because capitalists are simply much better at doing it. So it seems that, even when it succeeds, socialism can't really get rid of "the system", after all.

You are conflating Marxism with China, which is just a state-capitalist powerhouse using the exact same model of enclosure and rent-seeking we are arguing against. China doesn't "hand over" automation because capitalists are better at it; the state simply socializes the risk and R&D before letting private proxies handle the commercialization. Citing a state-backed monopoly system to prove "the market" is the only way to build tech is total nonsense.

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

#87

Post by ptero »

jowea wrote: post #69
ptero wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think it’s rather that people need to eat. They do and always did. But open source was originally not about that, but about building something cool and letting others build on that. And, crucially, about GPL preventing large companies from extinguishing your work "because copyright". I remember Bill Gates calling GPL a spreading virus that tech world has to fight. Sometime along this path monetizing open source b…

I think free software was more about that about that. Open source always was about getting financially motivated companies onboard.

I am not absolutely sure, but I do not think so.

Being old(ish) I recall in the early 90s Stallman advocating for (and mostly winning the argument in the tech circles at the time) open source as the primary tool for freedom to build things. With financial motivation possible, but completely orthogonal to the development of the open source software.

And how his argument (he was also a strong proponent of freedom to fork and improve in ways that the original developer did not do/want/agree with) was used against him in the early Emacs-XEmacs wars. When he tried to advocate that developers should support his Emacs version because he was the one who built Emacs (with tech retort being that his version sucks, he does not want to let others change it, so the community will build the features they want in XEmacs, thank you very much).

I think viable financial models of the last 15-20 years morphed open source into something different (in a kind of embrace-extend way). But I think that "extinguish" is very hard with OSS, so with financial models becoming less viable, open source might morph back somewhat. Or not; we shall see.

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

#88

Post by burnt-resistor »

This is pissing into the wind because in, the long run, AI will write the functionality it wanted to use instead because there are no magic or special libraries. Furthermore, it will eventually (over a long enough timescale) eat deeper down the stack by writing programming languages (with most incomprehensible to humans*), designing chips, designing systems, deploying code, planning datacenters, and designing products... this the manifestation of a gradual technological "singularity".

* This is how billionaire techbros will finally push most humans out of tech.

All they're doing now by putting up roadblocks is collectively punishing humans from competing with AI.

On the other side of the token, don't give away things and expect payment. Give things away because it's cool, not as a primary survival strategy based on mythological expectations of gratuity. It comes across as bitter giver's remorse. And unprofessional poison spewed onto social media also wrecks their professional reputation and drives customers away.

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

#89

Post by sph »

peepee1982 wrote: post #84
diego_moita wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And both of them failed. Both the machines and "the system" are alive and well. Did it occurred to you that you're using machines (computers, internet, HN) created by the system to complain about the system? The bitter truth is that we don't have any good alternative for both the machines and "the system". For Luddites' and Marxists' chagrin, manual weaving was indeed a crappy job and "the system" brought what they'd…

It is honestly depressing how many people have swallowed the capitalist pill so completely. Most people can't even fathom a world where cooperation actually works better than a cutthroat rat race. It leads to these total room-temperature takes that the system is the only reason we have the internet or Hacker News. It is exhausting watching people parrot the same old clichés because they are too lazy to actually crack…

Hell, the whole idea of open-source on which the entire modern tech world is based upon, which the Internet and Hacker News itself thrived upon, is completely antithetical to capitalism.

The cambrian explosion of tech exists because someone decided to give intellectual property away for free.

I agree with you. My hope and dream is that society is able to move on not by regressing to Luddism, but by restoring technology's position to service the people, as a tool for making life better, rather than to mould, measure and control humanity. Remember the sad meme that the brightest minds of our generations are thinking about how to make people click on ads. It is tragic.

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

#90

Post by [deleted] »

conartist6 wrote: post #75
midnitewarrior wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Vendetta code is not going to get you far. git works perfectly well. git is an afterthought. Engineers need to know git the same way they need to know markdown or SQL. The complexity of git is becoming less relevant by the day as coding agents take over coding responsibilities. If your git replacement is optimized for LLM use in ways that git cannot be optimized, you may get some traction. By all conventional measure…

If I have two advantages it's that nobody else is crazy enough to try this, and I'm not doing it as a vendetta at all. It started out as a toy project; I was just pushing the boundaries of what was possible with streaming parsers for fun. I only realized much later that I'd accidentally solved problems that were critical to version control.

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