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Does open source not itself severely mess with free market dynamics by having billions and billions of dollars of work being done for free?

• serbuvlad 2y ago
  There is a fundamental difference between a "regular" foss project and a "free" service in this sense. Once a foss project has been written, the cost of one additional user is almost zero (some small amount of bandwidth to obtain the package). I think it's legitimate to worry even about how the funding occurs for those comparatively small costs: the costs of running GitHub (subsidized by M$) and distribution repositories. But with an LLM service, or any other service which does not run locally, the cost of one additional user is very real. It has to be paid by someone.
• rtpg 2y ago
  I’m not a market fundamentalist, I just don’t like players dumping huge piles of cash in ways to get around market dynamics (especially for AI summaries, which is the computer equivalent of speed reading lessons) At least open source can outlive the entities that create the thing, and in theory is more about sharing process rather than trying to stomp out smaller players.