Comment by bloppe
3 hours ago
That's what people said about operating systems, and databases, and compilers, and so many other big complicated categories of software that over time became increasingly dominated by OSS
3 hours ago
That's what people said about operating systems, and databases, and compilers, and so many other big complicated categories of software that over time became increasingly dominated by OSS
OSS only dominates for software that is commoditized and the published computer science research for that software domain is close to the frontier.
OSS struggles at being relevant when software is non-commodity e.g. office suites. In software domains like databases where the state-of-the-art computer science research is often unpublished, OSS struggles to be relevant at the higher end of the market on technical merits.
When deciding what should be OSS, it is useful to consider the preconditions that have made it successful.
I personally expect token production to commoditized like mobile data. It's already happening.
See open weights gaining adoption, OpenAi talking about how 5.6 is cheaper than Fable, people are taking multiple approaches to reduce their token spend, expectations for progress in hardware and algos, and certain Ai leaders talking about how token prices should be 10-100x lower than they are.