[mellosouls]

The entire argument is framed through an anti-open-source view which sees participation as entirely motivated by money.

It's an unfortunate presentation that makes it more difficult to sympathise with - and ultimately it may not matter; either somebody else will fill the gap or the LLMs he resents will help coders create their products without the libraries he seems to think are valueless without a set financial cost.

[netsharc]

It's a sad world (or sad Internet) that when people do anything there's always a question of how to monetize it. Upload videos of you being goofy? "You should start a series! Make them longer than 8 minutes and you can qualify for YouTube ad money!". Write a blog? Similar stuff. TikTok? Go viral and maybe you'll find someone to pay you for... something.

And there's incentive reversal, I once saw someone who vlogs daily, his aim was to qualify for YouTube ad money, so everyday he rants for at least 8 minutes about how his life sucks and girls hate him (but that's fine because they just want to scam him for alimony anyway)...

[sallveburrpi]

> which sees participation as entirely motivated by money.

I think it’s rather that people need to eat. He admits that some wealthy devs will continue to work for free (do charity basically) but for those who want to make a living from OSS it will be harder and harder.

But yea as you said ultimately it probably won’t matter that much.

[ptero]

> I think it’s rather that people need to eat.

They do and always did. But open source was originally not about that, but about building something cool and letting others build on that. And, crucially, about GPL preventing large companies from extinguishing your work "because copyright". I remember Bill Gates calling GPL a spreading virus that tech world has to fight.

Sometime along this path monetizing open source became a thing. Now it is apparently becoming less lucrative. OK. That's the nature of changes, but IMO it does not kill open source. It might eventually make it even better, as commercial open source has become too widespread and money corrupts. My 2c.

[jowea]

I think free software was more about that about that. Open source always was about getting financially motivated companies onboard.

[ptero]

I am not absolutely sure, but I do not think so.

Being old(ish) I recall in the early 90s Stallman advocating for (and mostly winning the argument in the tech circles at the time) open source as the primary tool for freedom to build things. With financial motivation possible, but completely orthogonal to the development of the open source software.

And how his argument (he was also a strong proponent of freedom to fork and improve in ways that the original developer did not do/want/agree with) was used against him in the early Emacs-XEmacs wars. When he tried to advocate that developers should support his Emacs version because he was the one who built Emacs (with tech retort being that his version sucks, he does not want to let others change it, so the community will build the features they want in XEmacs, thank you very much).

I think viable financial models of the last 15-20 years morphed open source into something different (in a kind of embrace-extend way). But I think that "extinguish" is very hard with OSS, so with financial models becoming less viable, open source might morph back somewhat. Or not; we shall see.

[pepa65]

Stallman was propagating the ideal of Free and Open Source Software, where the notion of Freedom was paramount. I think that is the Free the poster you are responding to was talking about, not as in Freeware (usable without paying, but not necessarily open source).

[karmakaze]

This is demonstrating the difference that still exists between free software and open source. People who use GPL/AGPL want it to be shared and spread vs others using source as means to an end other than more/better software. There is still a problem with AI/LLMs though that basically de-GPL such licensed source.

[tvbusy]

You're thinking of open source projects that only need a few hours of work per week. Anything more than a few hours a week either requires someone to give up their full time job to work on it (switch to part time jobs/consultation is an option), or having multiple contributors which still require significant effort to coordinate at the end of the day.

Let's say Tailwind CSS gives up and stops the project, do you think there'll be someone else picking it up, knowing how Tailwind failed in the first place? LLMs don't create new things, they remix what are already available. It's delusional to think that you should use LLMs to create a whole UI library just for your application and spend enormous effort not only maintaining it but also train new team members to use it down the road.

Open source is charity, it's unreasonable, even entitled, to demand someone work on it full time without pay.

[jltsiren]

In my experience, people are willing to contribute up to 10 hours/week to individual volunteer projects they care about. That may increase to up to 20 hours/week for a year or two when they assume a key role.

A full-time job takes a third of your waking hours. Then you probably need to spend another third on various maintenance activities, leaving you with the equivalent of a full-time job to spend as you see fit.

Of course, when you have a volunteer-run project, your priorities will be different from projects that people do for a living. You will probably focus on what the contributors find interesting or important, rather than what someone else might find useful or valuable.

[mellosouls]

Open source is charity, it's unreasonable, even entitled, to demand someone work on it full time without pay

Of course, but equally it's also unreasonable and entitled to assume that if you work on it full time (or any time at all) that that work deserves or will receive a fair (or any) financial return. That's not what open source is about, and the featured post seems to miss that.