If you want people to pay you for your software, stop writing it for free. Conversely, if you write it for free, don't expect people to pay you for it. Otherwise you are no better than someone at an intersection with a bottle of Windex and a squeegee who, unsolicited, cleans a windshield and then demands the driver to pay for it.
The original authors of Free Software and open source were career academics and others who were paid to do other things, or were sponsored by scientific and defense research grants. I don't know how anyone got the nutty idea that you could make money on FOSS itself. Practically every time someone has tried to make money on FOSS it has failed.
(Edit: this comment previously ended with "...from Netscape on down.")
Indeed. It's either AGPLv3 or all rights reserved, and I'm increasingly in the proprietary camp.
There are two free software business models:
1. Choosing the most copyleft, most business hostile license imaginable (AGPLv3) and charging for permission to violate it.
2. Relying on crowd funded patronage via platforms like Patreon, GitHub Sponsors, Kickstarter.
AI's ability to rewrite entire codebases is quickly killing 1, and even the biggest projects which are most successful at 2 don't make enough to cover even a single full time developer's salary.
All of my new projects will be private by default from now on.
> AI's ability to rewrite entire codebases is quickly killing 1
People say things like this, but can you name an instance of this actually happening? What non-trivial existing free software has been displaced in popular use by a vibe-coded alternative?
Anthropic rewrote the MIT licensed Bun. The capability has clearly been demonstrated. As far as I'm concerned, the writing is on the wall.
And it's not just free software either. AI can quickly reverse engineer compiled software too. It's almost scary how it made short work of all the firmwares running on my laptop. Even the days of compiled proprietary software are numbered since AI can trivially make free software out of them.
We live in interesting times. The very act of publishing software at all is now questionable.
Disassembling a binary to tell you what it does is neat, but it doesn't give you anything new against free software whose source code was public to begin with.
Whereas if you ask it to generate a new large complex piece of software, the amount of human labor required to guide it into producing something that isn't hot garbage and then continue to maintain it indefinitely generally compares unfavorably with the amount it costs to buy a support contract for the existing thing.
otterley · · focus · HN ↗
The original authors of Free Software and open source were career academics and others who were paid to do other things, or were sponsored by scientific and defense research grants. I don't know how anyone got the nutty idea that you could make money on FOSS itself. Practically every time someone has tried to make money on FOSS it has failed.
(Edit: this comment previously ended with "...from Netscape on down.")
matheusmoreira · · focus · HN ↗
There are two free software business models:
1. Choosing the most copyleft, most business hostile license imaginable (AGPLv3) and charging for permission to violate it.
2. Relying on crowd funded patronage via platforms like Patreon, GitHub Sponsors, Kickstarter.
AI's ability to rewrite entire codebases is quickly killing 1, and even the biggest projects which are most successful at 2 don't make enough to cover even a single full time developer's salary.
All of my new projects will be private by default from now on.
AnthonyMouse · · focus · HN ↗
People say things like this, but can you name an instance of this actually happening? What non-trivial existing free software has been displaced in popular use by a vibe-coded alternative?
matheusmoreira · · focus · HN ↗
And it's not just free software either. AI can quickly reverse engineer compiled software too. It's almost scary how it made short work of all the firmwares running on my laptop. Even the days of compiled proprietary software are numbered since AI can trivially make free software out of them.
We live in interesting times. The very act of publishing software at all is now questionable.
AnthonyMouse · · focus · HN ↗
Whereas if you ask it to generate a new large complex piece of software, the amount of human labor required to guide it into producing something that isn't hot garbage and then continue to maintain it indefinitely generally compares unfavorably with the amount it costs to buy a support contract for the existing thing.