Comment by nz
2 days ago
Just to add to this. Open source for money has been a dead end for a long time, except for the (increasingly rare) situations where people accidentally convert their open source _contributions_ into employment (I accidentally did this back in 2015). Open source for recognition/reputation makes a bit more sense, but it is also becoming increasingly rare. LLMs are super-charging the extinction, but this was also observable in 2021, when I wrote this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29714929 .
Even before LLMs, I have seen people (shamelessly) re-implement code from open source project A into open source project B, without attribution (IIRC, a GPL C++ project [no hate, I use C++ too these days] basically copied the very distinctive AVL Tree implementation of a CDDL C project -- this is a licensing violation _and_ plagiarism, and it effectively writes the C project out of history. When asked about this, various colleagues[1], just shrugged their shoulders, and went on about their lives.). LLMs now make this behavior undetectable _and_ scalable.
If we want strong copyright protections for open source, we may need to start writing _literate_ programs (i.e. the Knuthian paradigm, which I am quite fond of). But that probably will not happen, because most programmers are bad at writing (because they hate it, and would rather outsource it to an LLM). The more likely alternative, is that people will just stop writing open source code (I basically stopped publishing my repos when the phrase "Big Tech" became common in 2018; Amazon in particular would create hosted versions of projects without contributing anything back -- if the authors were lucky they would be given the magnanimous opportunity to labor at Amazon, which is like inventing dynamite and being granted the privilege of laboring in the mines).
The fact is, if we want recognition, we need to sing each others' praises, instead hoping that someone will look at a version control history. We need to be story-tellers, historians, and archivists. Where is my generation's Jargon File?
[1]: Not co-worker, which is someone who shares an employer, but colleague, which is someone who shares a profession.
That's a big reason why FOSS is going to crumble. If AI succeeds and decimates the tech labor industry, people won't have the luxury to "code for fun". Life isn't a bunch of comfy programmers working on stuff in their spare time anymore.
We already see a component of this with art, but art actually needs to be displayed unlike code to show its vslue. So they adapt. Tools to keep the machine from training on their work, or more movements into work that is much harder to train on (a 2d image of a 3d model does the job and the model can be shared off the internet). Programming will follow a similar course; the remaining few become mercenaries and need to protect their IP themselves.