I'm interested in the bar for maintenance being lower. If there were some way to truly get the benefits of certain applications without centralizing on the cloud, that would be interesting.
At some point, you are paying rent to someone though, if you don't own the hardware. Tailscale only works because the broader Internet works and does routing. if you somehow displaced all the cloud services and solved auth,legal issues, etc. in a distributed efficient manner, I don't think that would remove the raw amount of bytes that needs to travel over the network. So maybe at that point "having an Internet connection" might be way more expensive, but the software itself is local? I don't know.
I see the opposite: AI has made it so easy to reverse engineer closed source stuff, that there's no point in closed source software anymore: anybody with a good AI in their hands will be able to completely RE whatever closed source you have and do whatever they want with it: pirate or create a clone or whatever. Also, find security holes. At this point, closing the source is really not doing a whole lot for you.
> Any project that sees a semblance of success will be cloned overnight many times over
The point of open source is that if your project is really good, people will not only clone it, but contribute their changes to it. Having a million forks is not productive and does not help the community at all, and, frankly, doesn't happen when the open source software is really useful: at some point people will get together and work for one of the "copies" to become the one everybody works with.
If your open source project gets forked and everybody starts contributing to the fork, maybe you should rethink how you approach your relationship with the community.
> Any project that sees a semblance of success will be cloned overnight many times over and will find itself competing with its own copies.
wasn't this always a risk with open source? also isn't that part of the point of open source? undoubtedly there are some forks out there that have become the new baseline. Besides, survival of the fittest. If some vibe-coded clone can compete, can manage updates, win market share, produce value superseding the original does that version not deserve it's share?
Personally I don't think it's all that trivial to maintain a large FOSS project, that vibe coded clones will simply not keep up because they were low effort and when they realize even with all the AI tools in the world it's still work to maintain a product they'll die off.
> what motivation remains to continue publishing as open source?
What motivation was there ever? prestige? money? accolades? Is that motivation actually gone?
Also closed source is not a protection anymore. look at Jev, they didn't even release the weights but everyone and their mother has a Jev-like model either out in the wild or in the works.
I feel that open source already has a big ecosystem that has formed around a lot of older software. It does make managing what is good and what is bad more difficult considering outward flux of these programs is a lot higher and most of them are just straight up copy-paste of already existing software without any benefit over the already existing software. It very likely is gonna be a cycle where we will see a surge of these software and they will slowly die out with no support or updates provided as it happened before but at a faster rate now.
> If some vibe-coded clone can compete, can manage updates, win market share, produce value superseding the original does that version not deserve it's share?
I don't mean to judge whether the outcome is better for society over all, but just wondering on the kind of impact it can have on the production side for now. Whether people are going to hesitate going open source and guard their IP in more ways than previously.
I'm interested in the bar for maintenance being lower. If there were some way to truly get the benefits of certain applications without centralizing on the cloud, that would be interesting.
At some point, you are paying rent to someone though, if you don't own the hardware. Tailscale only works because the broader Internet works and does routing. if you somehow displaced all the cloud services and solved auth,legal issues, etc. in a distributed efficient manner, I don't think that would remove the raw amount of bytes that needs to travel over the network. So maybe at that point "having an Internet connection" might be way more expensive, but the software itself is local? I don't know.
Corporations will always opt for closed source with explicit legal guarantees over community-driven open source.
I see the opposite: AI has made it so easy to reverse engineer closed source stuff, that there's no point in closed source software anymore: anybody with a good AI in their hands will be able to completely RE whatever closed source you have and do whatever they want with it: pirate or create a clone or whatever. Also, find security holes. At this point, closing the source is really not doing a whole lot for you.
> Any project that sees a semblance of success will be cloned overnight many times over
The point of open source is that if your project is really good, people will not only clone it, but contribute their changes to it. Having a million forks is not productive and does not help the community at all, and, frankly, doesn't happen when the open source software is really useful: at some point people will get together and work for one of the "copies" to become the one everybody works with.
If your open source project gets forked and everybody starts contributing to the fork, maybe you should rethink how you approach your relationship with the community.
Wonder if it's possible to put prompt injection within the compiled app to deter this. The next form of DRM?
I publish and use more open source than I ever did in the past.
> Any project that sees a semblance of success will be cloned overnight many times over and will find itself competing with its own copies.
wasn't this always a risk with open source? also isn't that part of the point of open source? undoubtedly there are some forks out there that have become the new baseline. Besides, survival of the fittest. If some vibe-coded clone can compete, can manage updates, win market share, produce value superseding the original does that version not deserve it's share?
Personally I don't think it's all that trivial to maintain a large FOSS project, that vibe coded clones will simply not keep up because they were low effort and when they realize even with all the AI tools in the world it's still work to maintain a product they'll die off.
> what motivation remains to continue publishing as open source?
What motivation was there ever? prestige? money? accolades? Is that motivation actually gone?
Also closed source is not a protection anymore. look at Jev, they didn't even release the weights but everyone and their mother has a Jev-like model either out in the wild or in the works.
I feel that open source already has a big ecosystem that has formed around a lot of older software. It does make managing what is good and what is bad more difficult considering outward flux of these programs is a lot higher and most of them are just straight up copy-paste of already existing software without any benefit over the already existing software. It very likely is gonna be a cycle where we will see a surge of these software and they will slowly die out with no support or updates provided as it happened before but at a faster rate now.
> If some vibe-coded clone can compete, can manage updates, win market share, produce value superseding the original does that version not deserve it's share?
I don't mean to judge whether the outcome is better for society over all, but just wondering on the kind of impact it can have on the production side for now. Whether people are going to hesitate going open source and guard their IP in more ways than previously.