- 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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I get where he’s coming from… I do… but it also sounds a lot like letting the dark side of the force win. The world is just better with more talent in open source. If only there was some recourse against letting LLM barons strip mine open source for all it’s worth and only leave behind ruin.
Some open source contributors are basically saints. Not everyone can be, but it still makes things look more bleak when the those fighting for the decent and good of the digital world abandon it and pick up the red sabre.
Unfortunately all open source software is just food for LLMs now. That’s something we’re gonna have to accept. Contribute to open source and OpenAI, Anthropic and Google will make money off your contributions.
So either we accept this, or the Odoo model kinda works if you still want to make money. It’s open core, and with an enterprise license you get access to the enterprise repository as well (or maybe you have to be a Partner, I don’t remember), but the enterprise codebase is not open source and not publicly available - meaning there’s a lot of stuff that the LLMs shouldn’t be able to learn from, but clients will still know what code is running on their servers (kinda important if you’re doing custom modules to extend the upstream ones)
I guess it’s bound to happen when you gotta pay your bills, but use of AI is lowering your income from your open source work (if any).
If only this publication was closed sourced.
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.
And when someone like Kat Marchán tried to raise awareness they get chased off the internet because an LLM did something OK a couple times.
Who dat?
They recently put together a list of software that was built using AI and a bunch of AI people didn’t take too kindly to it. The list has since been taken down and Kat has decided to take a break from open source software.
Most of the people on the list seemed pretty reasonable and were engaging in conversation about it. But emotions did begin to flare a bit and things got a bit out of hand. There are some conversations on Bluesky you might be able to find, but I think Kat also removed their account so the conversations might appear very one-sided.
It’s a very unfortunate outcome I feel. There are people on both sides of the debate whom I respect, Kat included.
if you have a link to the list/copies of it, please share it here. We can spread awareness so we can get some traction.
Unfortunately I didn’t clone the repository before it was taken down.
Capitalism is why we can’t have nice things.
LLMs are just a tool.
Tool used to fuck the poor.
Exaaaactly. None of this would be a problem if everyone’s basic necessities were a guarantee: housing, food, water, essential utilities. Think of all the cool stuff we’d have if all these OSS developers weren’t worried about putting food on the table. I would give zero shits if my open source work was “stolen” to make a profit by some giant company if I didn’t have to worry about making enough money to survive.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
Yea it it’s really too bad this guy wants to eat
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.
How would pay per access stop scrapping everything in one go. Also it is not just open stuff they train LLM s on, they steal everything.
If you turn your library into an API only (through a http server), you cant just “scrape everything” as to do anything you’d have to run an api request and these servers you send your request to will be metered.
Depends on what you’re building though, but that’s how I read it.
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.
You’re right. Personally, I’d rather support FOSS development. His justification isn’t 100% right but some of the idea resonates with me.
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
The idea of a “documentation moat” seems really gross to me. Like you’re going to make it more difficult on purpose for people to interact with your software, unless they pay?
Best coupled with frequent refactoring and breaking of APIs so any community efforts at documentation are eternally outdated.
tailwind is a product born out of complete ignorance for the fundamental technologies that underlay the web and why they exist the way they do. I hope tailwind’s decline encourages people to learn the fundamentals
Huh? How?
I don’t like tailwind personally, but it is just CSS classes.
When you make a website, you can sometimes end up with your own personal library of classnames (like what tailwind is).
Tailwind just goes to the extreme by making you only use classnames and never making your own library of css again.
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.
As Stallman said: " it’s free as in Free speech not as in Free beer".
Money in FOSS keeps projects going.
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.
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.
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.
Ah, the “only closed source should make money but I will demand opensource compete with it” take. Love it.
Then you should have no problem forking these repos and continue maintaining them for free.
Thank you for your service.
What a ridiculous response.
They said don’t start an open source project with the idea of making money, why would you suggest they should personally take over all of those projects that were started with the idea of making money?
What?
How about they just don’t use them when they become proprietary? They aren’t popular projects because their devs are extra brilliant or special, it’s because they’re free (libre), and the moment you restrict that freedom you lose the interest of a significant portion of the user base.
Developers need to eat, pay rent, etc.
Sounds like a bunch of crap, posted to LinkedIn of all sites, geez.
If it was for money, there are also Paid OSS, not all OSS is free to use. Anyway since nowadays a huge part of OSS is developed by Google, M$, Fakebook, Amazon and other Big Corporations, it turns more important as looking if the source of the product is readable, to look for the ethics, transparency and its community, not always advisable in OSS.
Why not go the route of a free consumer version and a paid enterprise version?
Also a possibility as others more. OSS always can have an paid model.
Generally my preference.
And a great excuse to get my company and/or clients to contribute to open source software efforts.
This is true. Free as in freedom not always as in beer. The source code must be made available to the cutomer along with compiled code but they can still sell it rather than provide it free of charge.
The only problem is your customer can post it online for free and there is nothing you can do about it.
Making money off of foss stopped as soon as the internet became widespread.
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.
Freedom of information is freedom for the most powerful to use that information for their profit. The more powerful you are, the more tools you have to harness common goods for profit.
