Comment by lrvick
13 days ago
I was like oh cool... until you mentioned the ads.
I would not fork or re-release proprietary code. I would ask my LLM to write a very rigorous end to end test suite for your tool, delete all the code, then have a clean context LLM re-write the code to pass all the same tests. Then I could publish it under an open license.
Ads are a cancer, and it is a matter of weeks before someone does the above where you have zero recourse.
I suggest open sourcing the code properly without ads yourself before someone does it for you. If you do that someone might donate to you instead of paying for the tokens to clone your work.
Software is no longer a moat and DMCA means nothing anymore.
How are you supposed to make a living without ads in this "ecosystem" or should we say walled garden?
Supposedly like any software company selling their product or a service.
If ad was the only way to get money, there would be no product/service to sell anymore and thus...nothing to advertise. It just cannot work that way.
I was a software engineer and pivoted to full time security about 10 years ago. Security will be in demand for a while longer I selfishly suspect.
As a reminder, this is the year 2026.
Photopea is lucky that it has a decent amount of revenue. But that's an exception, not the norm. Generally speaking, for new software, the business model of desktop, client-only software hasn't worked well since late 2010s at least, and nobody should expect to run a viable business like that today. There are very few applications you "install" on your computer that doesn't require native capabilities in some way.
Adobe buys ads rather than sells them, is that correct? How are they making money?
Enterprise customers and dark patterns.
You aren't. People aren't going to be able to make a living in software anymore, unless they work for a corporation. And even then, that's disappearing as well.
When the whole industry manually punched machine code into punch cards, people were threatened by assemblers taking their jobs, and then later by compilers, and now by inference engines.
The real engineering work that will always be paid for is identifying problems and testing solutions to see what solves the problems.
The substrate in which we use to do that will change, but the job will endure.
Those that just do what they are told however, yeah they are SOL unfortunately.
Creative problem solving is the only skill that will matter anymore.
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True. I understand the author on the emotional level, but the fact that a lot of work went into the product does not mean that it is that valuable. The author should focus on making the product better - unfortunately (for them) that means inventing a new business model.
Someone speaking the truth.
A closed source, client-only "desktop" application, especially a web app with obfuscated/minimized JavaScript code, has no real copyright protection these days. You either sell ads, sell it to enterprises, or if you are lucky enough to be able to pull it off, sell a subscription. Not putting the logic on the server in the first place means everything is basically public knowledge.
Hey buddy, you’d better be careful what you post on a public forum. Sooner or later somebody’s gonna ask their own personal LLM to write a comprehensive test suite for how you respond to comments and situations, move the mouse cursor upwards and to the left to click a button there, and recreate you as legally their property now. If I were you I’d gimme money gimme moneyyyyyy before my big LLM here teaches you a lesson the hard way.
Please rip me off if you can! I would be thrilled. I open source 100% of my work and if people plagiarize it and the net result is my work and ideas positively impacted more people, then that is an outcome I am proud of.
I must confess, I don’t actually think I can. That’d be pretty sweet, though, if we could.