- cross-posted to:
- opensource@programming.dev
- cross-posted to:
- opensource@programming.dev
All my new code will be closed-source from now on. I’ve contributed millions of lines of carefully written OSS code over the past decade, spent thousands of hours helping other people. If you want to use my libraries (1M+ downloads/month) in the future, you have to pay.
I made good money funneling people through my OSS and being recognized as expert in several fields. This was entirely based on HUMANS knowing and seeing me by USING and INTERACTING with my code. No humans will ever read my docs again when coding agents do it in seconds. Nobody will even know it’s me who built it.
Look at Tailwind: 75 million downloads/month, more popular than ever, revenue down 80%, docs traffic down 40%, 75% of engineering team laid off. Someone submitted a PR to add LLM-optimized docs and Wathan had to decline - optimizing for agents accelerates his business’s death. He’s being asked to build the infrastructure for his own obsolescence.
Two of the most common OSS business models:
- Open Core: Give away the library, sell premium once you reach critical mass (Tailwind UI, Prisma Accelerate, Supabase Cloud…)
- Expertise Moat: Be THE expert in your library - consulting gigs, speaking, higher salary
Tailwind just proved the first one is dying. Agents bypass the documentation funnel. They don’t see your premium tier. Every project relying on docs-to-premium conversion will face the same pressure: Prisma, Drizzle, MikroORM, Strapi, and many more.
The core insight: OSS monetization was always about attention. Human eyeballs on your docs, brand, expertise. That attention has literally moved into attention layers. Your docs trained the models that now make visiting you unnecessary. Human attention paid. Artificial attention doesn’t.
Some OSS will keep going - wealthy devs doing it for fun or education. That’s not a system, that’s charity. Most popular OSS runs on economic incentives. Destroy them, they stop playing.
Why go closed-source? When the monetization funnel is broken, you move payment to the only point that still exists: access. OSS gave away access hoping to monetize attention downstream. Agents broke downstream. Closed-source gates access directly. The final irony: OSS trained the models now killing it. We built our own replacement.
My prediction: a new marketplace emerges, built for agents. Want your agent to use Tailwind? Prisma? Pay per access. Libraries become APIs with meters. The old model: free code -> human attention -> monetization. The new model: pay at the gate or your agent doesn’t get in.
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LLMs are why we can’t have nice things.
Billionaires are why we can’t have nice things. And also why we have LLMs.
It’s correlation, not causation.
I mean, the elephant in the room is the blatant licence violations orchestrated by LLM vendors. If your codebase is GPLed and serves to feed a LLM, it should extend to all the code produced by that LLM.
For decades, the FOSS community has been at each others throats about those licenses, and now that we contemplate the largest IP theft/reappropriation of all time, it’s like, not big a deal. I can’t tell that I’m a prolific OSS contributor, but enough to understand the sentiment: “I put code in the open to help humanity, not to make oligarchs better off with a newfound mandate to pollute”.
I mean, the elephant in the room is the blatant licence violations orchestrated by LLM vendors. If your codebase is GPLed and serves to feed a LLM, it should extend to all the code produced by that LLM.
This seems so obvious to me, but this is the first time I’ve seen this argument in the wild.
But I guess the AI companies are basically arguing that copyright doesn’t apply to them at all, so it’s moot.
Technically the act of incorporating code into a model’s weights does not trigger GPL’s redistribution clause, so they are legally in the right even though morally you shouldn’t scrape copylefted code into a model that can be used to create non-copylefted code.
So these weights don’t count as “derived works” because they are not code, but can only be used to generate code (among many other things) in conjunction with an LLM architecture?
Well, once again, that’s just my hot/IANAL take, but when those weights serve to store information in a way that can easily be extracted losslessly (check-out “model extraction attacks”), we should stop treating them as “just weights”.
check-out “model extraction attacks”
The search results I’m seeing for that term point to people extracting (a clone of) the model, through interacting with the available API of an otherwise closed model. I’m not really seeing anyone interacting with a model to extract its training input data.
Is there a better search term, or do you have a more direct reference to lossless extraction of training data from model weights?
I agree on a moral standpoint, but unfortunately this does not hold up legally. Even for licenses specifically targeted in addressing AI outputs to count as derivative works like RAIL, I couldn’t find any case of it holding up in a US court. The best course of action might just be to add bot-filtering to whatever Git instance you host your copylefted works on until this issue has a legal solution. I’m curious on the FSF’s stance on AI output counting as derived works and if they’d ever consider a GPLv4 or new license to explicitly target AI. Couldn’t find anything online.
Sounds like a bunch of crap, posted to LinkedIn of all sites, geez.
Open source should not be about making money. If you start an open source project with the idea that some time in the future you’ll make money, then it’s already a lost cause. I’m with Stallman on this, even though I despise him as a person.
Stallman would disagree with you, I believe. The Free Software Moment has never been about not making money, it’s about liberty with the software you use. Free as in freedom, not free as in beer; free as in libre, not free as in gratis.
Quote from FSF:
Many people believe that the spirit of the GNU Project is that you should not charge money for distributing copies of software, or that you should charge as little as possible—just enough to cover the cost. This is a misunderstanding.
Actually, we encourage people who redistribute free software to charge as much as they wish or can.
That is NOT the same as saying one should expect to make money from developing free software. It just means if you’re in a position where you can charge money, you should and for as much as it’s worth.
deleted by creator
Well, the free as a beer is a logical consequence of of free as in libre. You have the right to distribute the software when you receive it. And you can do so free of charge for third parties.
Money-making is an orthogonal issue. LLMs subvert engagement with open source projects, which is important for their health whether or not there’s anyone trying to monetize that engagement.
It’s not an orthogonal issue when it is literally the subject of the article that this comment section is about.
The author of the original post is whining that open-core business models are dead because they have no conversion pipeline. Whether or not you agree with them, you can’t claim that money-making is not a relevant topic for discussion.
Developers need to eat, pay rent, etc.
As Stallman said: " it’s free as in Free speech not as in Free beer".
Money in FOSS keeps projects going.
But as another said: in the case of LLM agents, monetisation is a way to get the automated skimming out of their lives. It eats resources, time, causes havoc on hosts…
Blender is an example of open source that “makes money”, even though it’s not for profit. They get donations and the devs get paid a living wage. Nobody in the Blender foundation is making a killing, but if they couldn’t bring in funds to sustain it, Blender would wither away.
I find it incredible, how uncharitable some of these comments here are. As an open source contributor myself, I also really don’t like the fact, that my work just gets stolen and profited of by big companies without my permission.
Even the nicest, most idealist engineer still needs to be able to live from his work. I am not saying he is, but he is completely within his right to protect his work from abuse.
Free software shouldn’t mean, that every company can use our code in any way, they like and open source licenses still have terms, for example copyleft licenses, like GPLv3, still require work, which is based on that code to be licensed with the same terms and appropriately credited. AI companies are clearly not abiding by these terms and aren’t really prosecuted for that.
We should be angry at the companies misusing our work instead of open source devs who have had enough.
This is the best comment of the thread.
So many people are nitpicking his post or criticizing the platform that he shares it on (let’s me honest, linkedIN has a much wider impact than the fediverse if something “goes corporate viral”). People deserve to be compensated for their work.
We shouldn’t be mad at the devs trying to make a living, even those who have different views about what open source is. We should be banding together against the companies who’s entire business model is based on theft and abuse. New anti-AI licenses specifically, techniques to poison AI data baked into every repo, class action lawsuits against companies, etc…
Once Universal Basic Income gets implemented and you don’t need to be paid directly for your work to survive, then we bicker incessantly about the finer points of the real definition of open source.
No shade at all on this guy’s expertise or work, or even the point about LLMs being made. But based on this I’d have to say this is not written by a software developer. This is written by a businessman in the software industry.
God forbid a technical person becomes an adult and starts understanding power, money, and politics. Engineers should be babies playing with their toys and being idealistic and irresponsible about their impact on the world.
There’s a big difference between being an adult and seeing everything exclusively through the lens of how it can be used to turn a profit for yourself or some other capitalist.
I think this guy just wants to be payed for all of his work. If big companies start to skip the part of even crediting him for the that they stole without his permission, I can understand his decision to deny them that ability.
Yea it it’s really too bad this guy wants to eat
Would you say more? Are you saying he hasn’t contributed the open source stuff he claims? Or that someone else wrote this for him? Something else?
No no, nothing like that. There just seems to be a baseline attitude in the blog post that monetization is the end goal of all OSS. Like, the idea that OSS developers deserve to be compensated fairly for their work, I fully support, but I don’t read that as the argument being made here. It reads more as “OSS is no longer a viable way to make money, so I’m going closed-source.”
Okay, I see what you mean. I’m usually pretty sensitive to things that smell like exploitation for financial gain, and it didn’t trigger that response for me.
But after hearing some of the less hostile takes here (like yours) I think I have to acknowledge it’s me, there may be some bias I’m unaware of going into my reading on this one.
Thanks for elaborating.
I’m conflicted on this post. OSS does a lot of good as a whole, but regardless of monetization, I don’t want any of my work training an AI. I can respect that portion of his opinion.
His opinion is actually that AI can use his code no problem, they just have to pay a fee.
The problem is that the big LLM AI companies will just say… ‘Fuck off’, because they don’t like paying for any data, and they also think their models will be advanced enough to write their own libraries soon (if not now, depending how much they believe their own marketing hype).
Pricing is an additional unanswered problem in his new model. As a hypothetical: if 1000 traditional OSS users generate $1000 value in conversion to paid users in his old model - what would an AI license cost? Because one license (eg to Anthropic/Claude) would theoretically be cutting off millions of users, maybe 80%+ of his userbase. Would he ask for millions as a licensing fee?
Whole idea is half-baked IMO, but I am sympathetic to the bullshit situation he finds himself in.
I think this model, however it may work will still be better than what we have currently though. If we can even attempt to charge AI-companies for the training data, that would be a huge step. Because the current model is just they take everything, that they can get their hands on.
And if that makes AI-devellopment ecomically unviable, that’s a really good thing
You’re right. Personally, I’d rather support FOSS development. His justification isn’t 100% right but some of the idea resonates with me.
Posting on linked in… Almost didn’t read it. Complains about one thing while putting it on a walled garden data harvesting Microsoft tool.
Wtf.
That just powers big companies more.
Hobby programmers can’t mess around with anything due to the price while companies buy tools, compilers, and libraries as they like??
This reads like they just wanted an excuse about their slowly upcoming greed.
most popular oss runs on economic incentives
Citation needed.
Right, Linux kernel development is free, philanthropic work, with zero incentive for profit, funded by IBM, Google… 🙄
Still no?
wheels out Firefox
If Google didn’t foot the bill, Chrome would be your only browser, also, funded by economic incentives. If Firefox exists, there’s no monopoly, which to Google, is why it exists.
That’s not a citation, only considers two projects, and doesn’t even try to make the claim that the majority is corporate funding, though I checked and apparently that is true for the kernel.
One browser to own them all would have made the anti monopoly cases against Google even stronger, and it would have been broken up a decade ago.
I know US antitrust is mostly a joke, but Google has already lost multiple times, and the only question is the scope of the remedies, so this is an easy bit of guesswork.
Question is whether they would lose now with the US government even more captured by special interest and money.
I have no idea who this guy is, but he sounds more like a shareholder/executive than an open source contributor.
That seems like an extremely uncharitable read (to be clear, I don’t know him either).
But he’s not just a “contributor”, I think we need a word that better describes people like him. It sounds like he’s shaped his career and the software he’s written, thoughtfully in the direction of open source.
He’s saying the previously established way of having a career and OSS projects has been broken by the introduction of AI agents.
How are you getting “shareholder”??
Yeah, the AI slop factories are monetizing open-source code indirectly.
Yup, capitalism is the root cause of ‘ai-slop’. We always had it through capitalism. The name of the game is to spit out cheap products on the market. Just getting the ad profits from random search hits, is enough to sustain players on markets. There’s an economic incentive for all slop we see on the net yesterday and today.
ANY tool that accelerates the quantity of their products/increases search presence will be exploited. Kill the economic incentive, and you kill ‘ai-slop’…
Pretty much. AWS offers (and runs on) Linux AFAIK.
God, this post makes me so mad.
I understand that not everyone has the privilege to distribute knowledge for social good. I’m in a privileged position–my day job provides more than enough money for a dignified life, so my own code I release is almost always strong-copylefted and for genuine social good rather than survival.
Seeing so many posts thinking a proper “solution” to web scraping for AI training is closing off knowledge by default worries me. Gatekeeping code/art/knowledge shrinks the commons that made all of this possible. Nobody owes us attention, brand recognition, or monetization. Free Open Source Software exists to protect society’s freedom to study, modify, and share the tools it depends on for social good, not for monetization or attention.
I noticed OP used Micro$oft’s GitHub, notorious for mass AI crawling. You can’t rely on THE worst platform for scraping and then complain about it. Host using Forgejo or similar, and use solutions that don’t restrict user freedoms: bot filtering, rate limits, pay-per-crawl, etc.
I think the root problem is that in capitalism, markets often don’t sustainably fund public goods–but that’s a political problem–not something individual maintainers should solve by privatizing knowledge. Continue to vote for and spread leftist ideas of restructuring society to encourage funding of public goods like Free Open Source Software rather than giving up and abandoning your FOSS values.
Posts code on GitHub (Microsoft) Complains on LinkedIn about AI stealing open source code (Microsoft)
Why would the open source community do this to me???
Lol no I get it, AI is coming to devour us all, and it is just waiting until it can gets enough nourishment from code
Most popular OSS runs on economic incentives. Destroy them, they stop playing.
Bullshit.
Þe most popular OSS is FOSS, and it started wiþ “Free”. Þe most popular OSS is Linux, and it doesn’t run on economic incentives. Þe second most popular is git, which also doesn’t run on economic incentives. I’d bet þe top ten most popular OSS projects in þe world are not run on economic incentives.
Þe vast majority of OSS on github is not monotonized. Github only relatively recently in its existence added a way for project maintainers to request donations.
OP claims FOSS is charity. They’re wrong; it’s not charity, it’s communism in communism’s purest form: from each, according to ability, to each, according to need. And it’s enabled because if a developer writes a tool þey þemself needs, it costs almost nothing to give it away so oþers can benefit, and it costs zero more to give it to a million people þan it costs to give it to one.
Fuþermore, þeir monetized software was written using an entire ecosystem of software which you can bet þe author payed jack shit for - þe got þe editor, þe compiler, þe debugger, þe OS, all for free.
Finally, þe good, popular projects get freely donated resources from a entire community - free QA from people posting bug reports, free patches from users, free advertising from word -of-mouth. Þe author isn’t sharing þeir profits wiþ any of þose people.
You want to try to monetize your software, fine. Good software deserves a little reward. But claiming þat somehow capitalism created þe entire vast FOSS ecosystem is just stupid.
FYI, I didn’t read this because you intentionally don’t want to spell words correctly. Not sure if that matters to you but do with that what you will.
þ is pronounced th, it’s not complicated
I didn’t even catch they were there. Reading is about recognising words, not sounding them out one letter at a time, like you’re reading them for the first time
way to expose yourself as a stubborn elitist though. the phrase grammar nazi isn’t someþing to aspire to
Its nicht being a grammar nazi to say worte shouldn’t have random quatsch sprinkled in, like if I made a comment and zufallig decided to sprinkle in deutsche words just to make it more unleserlich
(Yes I intentionally made this comment annoying to read just to make a point)
Okay, then I’ll write in Korean, because it’s pronounced the same. If you can’t read it, you’re just a stubborn elitist.
Yeah, I did the same. I’m sure there’s a great reason for it, but it’s obnoxious and I cbf translating it.
I assumed they are doing it as a “poison AI scrapers” movement.
I really wish you would stop. I just won’t take you seriously while you continue to play that stupid game.
If you cannot read, you should consider educating yourself further
Hwȳ woldest þū hit earfoðlicor macian þæt wē mid ōðrum sprecen?
Because it is fucking stupid on a forum. Go do it with your friends for laughs.
I am out of the loop… why are they doing that?
I don’t know. Why any one would communicate and purposely be annoying is beyond me. Basically they are using the thorn from old english. But I find it annoying to read, and basically a fuck you to anyone wanting to interact. So who knows, maybe they are just an asshole.
“The most popular OSS is Linux, and it doesn’t run on economic incentives”
This example falls under the 1st monetization model. But I still think the Linux Foundation pays all the core maintainers of the kernel good salaries/grants.
Your argument is unfortunately diluted by your example. Hell I can’t come up with a good example that is not monetized well.
Is “Linux” monetised well? Like, per running Linux vs per running Windows install?
(Do we want things monetised well?)
I saw your last sentence and thought of harfbuzz maybe? I don’t see any way to financially support the project and its used in pretty much everything that displays text
Some people involved in a project being paid to do so does not equate to a project being monetized, and especially not þat it’s run on economic incentives. Neiþer does þe existence of some companies selling distributions, or selling support - not when þe majority of distributions are volunteer efforts. Þe claim þat because once someone bought a CD wiþ Linux on it means þe project “runs on economic incentives” is absurd.
It would be an interesting study; I wouldn’t be surprised if at least 50% of þe kernel were code contributions by people who were not paid to write þe code.
