An app like Cal.com can be vibe coded in a few evenings with a Chrome MCP server pointed to their website to figure out all the nooks and crannys. The moat of Cal.com is not the code, it's the users who don't want to migrate.
The real answer is they are likely having a hard time converting people to paid plans
Exactly, that's why most Saas companies are in a very tough position.
You have to bring value that goes beyond the source code and hosting, otherwise your clients are going to vibe code a custom solution instead of paying you.
> otherwise your clients are going to vibe code a custom solution instead of paying you.
How many things do you want to be responsible for? How many vibe coded projects do you want to maintain?
I think this line of reasoning is overblown. Just because you can doesn't mean a significant number of people will. I think the 3D printer comparison is apt.
They won’t, because specialization is a key aspect of capitalism.
This is why companies outsource anything. Google, Inc. is big enough to own farms and ranches to grow the food eaten in its cafeterias. They could make trucks to transport that food. They could operate factories to make cutlery, etc. Why do they instead choose to pay layers of margins to layers of middlemen?
Absurd example? How about Apple? They outsource production of their chips, instead of capturing the margin they are currently gifting to their partners. Why?
Delta Airlines doesn’t operate oil fields or even refineries even though a major cost of their operations is jet fuel. Why?
Once you can reason through these very simple examples, you will understand why enterprises are unlikely to walk away from SaaS.
> How many vibe coded projects do you want to maintain?
here comes the next SaaS idea - vibe coded services as a service. You tell what service you want, may be point out a couple examples, and you get that service vibe coded and hosted for you for a small monthly fee!
I agree with the other poster that mention this is likely a publicity stunt but all it's really showing is that VC is still incredibly stupid with their money. All the more reason to seize it from them then properly fund useful software and not subsidize vanity projects for stanford grads.
About the friction, not the capabilities...I haven't switched off my biz calendar/appointment provider I'm paying for even though I've kinda outgrown it.
Email is actually a excellent example of something with network dependence. Changing email providers requires that you change your email address too (unless you own and use your own domain). An address change causes friction from having to update the network of contacts and services which used your old email address.
For many use cases, maintenance doesn't matter. At this point, using LLMs to one-shot a tool/service for a single use or time-limited use case is becoming more appealing than signing up with some vendor, even for free.
May be trying creating one and see how much effort and time is required to clone such a functionality to a proper working state! Something for personal use can be created in about 5-10 days, but even then the skill that is required and the amount of tokens to burn, hosting and security etc, will easily kill. This is exactly the thought process of many, but it will surely kill many opensource contributors. I've stopped committing anything to any open source repos as a personal choice. I do not want to train a LLM which will eventually create more slop and headaches since for me, time is the only important factor which holds the maximum value! Nothing else!
At risk of self promotion, I think more people should adopt something like the Ship of Theseus license (https://github.com/tilework-tech/nori-skillsets/pull/465/cha...). It's not obvious if this will patch the clean room hole in licensing, but I'd rather see it play out in court than assume opensource is just fully dead
I am incredibly skeptical that license is legally meaningful. (but obligatory IANAL.)
Generally speaking it is very very difficult to have a license redefine legal terms. Either this theseus copy is legally a derivative work or it isn't, and text of a license is going to do at most very very little to change that.
> It's not obvious if this will patch the clean room hole in licensing, but I'd rather see it play out in court than assume opensource is just fully dead
IANAL, but I don't think there is any "clean room hole in licensing": licensing is downstream of copyright law, and clean-room reverse engineering, if done properly, results in products that do not infringe the copyright of the originating work to begin with, so the license therefore never applies to them.
The "Ship of Theseus" license you've linked to attempts to define for itself what constitutes a derivative work, but what is and is not a derivative work is determined by copyright law itself, and there's no concept of imposing licensing conditions on works that your copyright never extended to in the first place.
Simply put, if something isn't infringing your copyright under the criteria established by the law, then your permission was never needed to do it in the first place, so the conditions under which you would or would not be willing offer that permission are irrelevant.
If someone spends years using your software and they have learned a mental model of how your software works, they can build an exact replica and there is nothing you can do about that since there is no copy you can sue over. Said user is also allowed to use AI tools to aid in the process.
What you want is an EULA, which is a contract users explicitly have to agree with. A license file only grants access or the right to copy, it doesn't affect usage of your software.
"AI slop is rapidly destroying the WWW, most of the content is becoming more and more low-quality and difficult to tell if its true or hallucinated. Pre-AI web content is now more like the golden-standard in terms of correctness, browsing the Internet Archive is much better. This will only cause content to go behind pay-walls, allot of open-source projects will be closed source not only because of the increased work maintainers have to do to not only review but also audit patches for potential AI hallucinations but also because their work is being used to train LLMs and re-licensed to proprietary."
Replace AI with "open source and Linux", and "open source" with "Windows" in the statements. That's what Microsoft's PR team would have said about open source and Linux about 20 years back in the 2000s.
After the unsuccessful FUD era, now Microsoft is running away with Linux by running its Windows alongside via WSL to combat MacOS Unix-like popularity, and due to Linux and open source dominance in the cloud OS demographic.
Even worse, in that Microsoft's FUD was mostly right. The joke about Open Source being communism played out straight - FOSS pretty much destroyed the ability to make money on software products, accelerating transition to SaaS models where you can carefully seek rent from the shelter of your secure company servers (later, cloud), and that is in large part responsible for modern surveillance economy - as it turns out, some SaaS segments decayed to "free with ads", where - much like with OSS and locally-run software - you cannot compete on price with free.
The real answer is they are likely having a hard time converting people to paid plans