[samwillis]

I'm convinced that LLMs results in all software needing to be open source (or at the very least source available).

In future everyone will expect to be able to customise an application, if the source is not available they will not chose your application as a base. It's that simple.

The future is highly customisable software, and that is best built on open source. How this looks from a business perspective I think we will have to find out, but it's going to be fun!

[charcircuit]

Why do you think customization can only viably done via changing the code of the application itself.

I think there is room for closed source platforms that are built on top of using LLMs via some sort of API that it exposes. For example, iOS can be closed source and LLMs can develop apps for it to expand the capabilities of one's phone.

Allowing total customization by a business can allow them to mess up the app itself or make other mistakes. I don't think it's the best interface for allowing others to extend the app.

[dom96]

I'm convinced of the opposite. I think a lot more software will be closed source so that an LLM cannot reproduce it from its training data for free.

[MaxBarraclough]

> In future everyone will expect to be able to customise an application, if the source is not available they will not chose your application as a base. It's that simple.

This seems unlikely. It's not the norm today for closed-source software. Why would it be different tomorrow?

[simonw]

Because we now have LLMs that can read the code for us.

I'm feeling this already.

Just the other day I was messing around with Fly's new Sprites.dev system and I found myself confused as to how one of the "sprite" CLI features worked.

So I went to clone the git repo and have Claude Code figure out the answer... and was surprised to find that the "sprite" CLI tool itself (unlike Fly's flycli tool, which I answer questions about like this pretty often) wasn't open source!

That was a genuine blocker for me because it prevented me from answering my question.

It reminded me that the most frustrating thing about using macOS these days is that so much of it is closed source.

I'd love to have Claude write me proper documentation for the sandbox-exec command for example, but that thing is pretty much a black hole.

[MaxBarraclough]

I'm not convinced that lowering the barrier to entry to software changes will result in this kind of change of norms. The reasons for closed-source commercial software not supporting customisation largely remain the same. Here are the ones that spring to mind:

• Increased upfront software complexity

• Increased maintenance burden (to not break officially supported plugins/customizations)

• Increased support burden

• Possible security/regulatory/liability issues

• The company may want to deliberately block functionality that users want (e.g. data migration, integration with competing services, or removing ads and content recommendations)

> That was a genuine blocker for me because it prevented me from answering my question.

It's always been this way. From the user's point of view there has always been value in having access to the source, especially under the terms of a proper Free and Open Source licence.