5 ms·

It seems open source loses the most from AI. Open source code trained the models, the models are being used to spam open source projects anywhere there's incent

by jameslk 9mo ago

It seems open source loses the most from AI. Open source code trained the models, the models are being used to spam open source projects anywhere there's incentive, they can be used to chip away at open source business models by implementing paid features and providing the support, and eventually perhaps AI simply replaces most open source code

giancarlostoro 9mo ago
I wouldn't say open source code solely trained the models, surely there are CS courses and textbooks, official documentation as well as transcripts of talks and courses all factor in as well. On another note, regarding AI replacing most open source code. I forget what tool it was, but I had a need for a very niche way of accessing an old Android device it was rooted, but if I used something like Disk Drill it would eventually crap out empty files. So I found a GUI someone made, and started asking Claude to add things I needed for it to a) let me preview directories it was seeing and b) let me sudo up, and let me download with a reasonable delay (1s I think) which basically worked, I never had issues again, it was a little slow to recover old photos, but oh well. I debated pushing the code changes back into github, it works as expected, but it drifted from the maintainers own goals I'm sure.
ValveFan6969 9mo ago
"open source" and "business model" in the same sentence... next you're gonna tell me to eat pudding with a fork.
- jameslk 9mo ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_models_for_open-source_software https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_models_for_open-sourc... I think you should try eating pudding with a fork next
  - bigstrat2003 9mo ago
    I mean... not what the other poster meant, but https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sticky_toffee_pudding https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sticky_toffee_pudding exists and is absolutely delicious.
    - jameslk 9mo ago
      Flan is also a type of pudding (milk/eggs base) which can be ate with a fork. Other baked custards too
  - robin_reala 9mo ago
    You’d hardly eat black pudding with a spoon. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_pudding https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_pudding
    - jjgreen 9mo ago
      Au contraire: https://www.anotherfoodblogger.com/recipes/potato-leek-black-pudding-soup/ https://www.anotherfoodblogger.com/recipes/potato-leek-black...
      - robin_reala 9mo ago
        I stand corrected!
- Aeglaecia 9mo ago
  i believe that the existence of not for profit organizations is a valid counterpoint to whatever your argument is
- Grollicus 9mo ago
  Just leaving this here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pudding_mit_Gabel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pudding_mit_Gabel
  - em-bee 9mo ago
    already decades ago when we were kids eating pudding with a fork was a fun past time, and i am sure the idea is as old as pudding or forks themselves. i mean, the fact that it spread so fast shows that there are many who already practiced it. it's actually surprising it took this long to become a meme. heck, my cousin bet with me or let me compete eating pudding with chopsticks. (and that was long before i went to china) practically speaking, the only downside of using a fork (or chopsticks) is scraping the bottom when you are finishing up.
    - account42 9mo ago
      I think the meme is as much about a meetup with strangers to eat pudding as it is about using a fork to do it.
- timeon 9mo ago
  > next you're gonna tell me to eat pudding with a fork Depends if you are in UK or not.
bawolff 9mo ago
> they can be used to chip away at open source business models by implementing paid features and providing the support There are a lot of things to be sad about AI, but this is not it. Nobody has a right to a business model, especially one that assumes nobody will compete with you. If your business model relies on the rest of the world bring sucky so you can sell some value-added to open-core software, i'm happy when it fails.
- sevenzero 9mo ago
  Competition is extremely important yes. But not the kind of competition, backed by companies that have much bigger monetary assets, to overwhelm projects based on community effort just to trample it down. The FFMPEG Google stuff as an example.
- anileated 9mo ago
  When LLMs are based on stolen work and violate GPL terms, which should be already illegal, it's very much okay to be furious about the fact that they additionally ruin respective business models of open source, thanks to which they are possible in the guest place.
  - charcircuit 9mo ago
    >“Free software” means software that respects users' freedom and community. Roughly, it means that the users have the freedom to run, copy, distribute, study, change and improve the software. https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html Being able to learn from the code is a core part of the ideology embedded into the GPL. Not only that, but LLMs learning from code is fair use.
    - jeroenhd 9mo ago
      That freedom for many free licenses comes with the caveat that you provide basic attribution and the same freedom to your users. LLMs don't (cannot, by design) provide attribution, nor do LLM users have the freedom to run most of these models themselves.
shubhamjain 9mo ago
I feel AI will have the same effect degrading Internet as social media did. This flood of dumb PRs, issues is one symptom of it. Other is AI accelerating the trend which TikTok started—short, shallow, low-effort content. It's a shame since this technology is brilliant. But every tech company has drank the “AI is the future” Kool-aid, which means no one has incentive to seriously push back against the flood of low-effort, AI-generated slop. So, it's going to be race to the bottom for a while.
- sevenzero 9mo ago
  It'll stop soonish. The industry is now financed by debt rather than monetary assets that actually exist. Tons of companies see zero gain from AI as its reported repeatedly here on HN. So all the LLM vendors will eventually have to enshittify their products (most likely through ads, shorter token windows, higher pricing and whatnot). As of now, not a sustainable business model thankfully. The only sad part is that this debt will hit the poorest people most.
  - duskdozer 9mo ago
    I'm not so confident that "makes the product worse and makes them less money" is even enough to make them not do it anyway
- killerstorm 9mo ago
  I think "internet" needs a shared reputation & identity layer - i.e. if somebody offers a comment/review/contribution/etc, it should be easy to check - what else are their contributing, who can vouch for them, etc. Most of innovation came from web startups who are just not interest in "shared" anything: they want to be a monopoly, "own" users, etc. So this area has been neglected, and then people got used to status quo. PGP / GPG used to have web-of-trust but that sort of just died. People either need to resurrect WoT updated for modern era, or just accept the fact that everything is spammed into smithereens. Blaming AI and social media does not help.
pravj 9mo ago
Extending on the same line, we will see programs like Google Summer of Code (GSoC) getting a massive revamp, or they will stop operating. From my failed attempt, I remember that - Students had to find a project matching their interests/skills and start contributing early. - We used to talk about staying away from some projects with a low supply of students applying (or lurking in the GitHub/BitBucket issues) because of the complexity required for the projects. Both of these acted as a creative filter for projects and landed them good students/contributors, but it completely goes away with AI being able to do that at scale.
- delfinom 9mo ago
  GSoC 4 years ago removed the need for their to be actual students to apply. We got flooded with middle aged men working 9-5s applying. It was dumb and we stopped participating. Their incentives were literally "extra income" instead of learning or participating beyond that.
  - 72deluxe 9mo ago
    But that sounds rewarding for the applicants, and the project?? The project gets code, and the guys get some money. Being a middle aged man working 9 to 5, I would enjoy contributing to a project I was interested in rather than the boring job at work. Are you saying you only wanted penniless youngsters to contribute, based entirely on their idealism?
GardenLetter27 9mo ago
How so? I think the Bazaar model has the most to gain - contributors can use LLMs to create PRs, and you can choose from a vast array of projects depending on how much you trust vibe coding.
- meibo 9mo ago
  Most of the drive-by LLM PRs we get are useless, waste our time and are super verbose on top of that. I don't review code like that anymore.
direwolf20 9mo ago
[dead]
epolanski 9mo ago
AI is not submitting the slop, people are. This is not a technology, but ethics and respect problem. From the same article: > Not all AI-generated bug reports are nonsense. It’s not possible to determine the exact share, but Daniel Stenberg knows of more than a hundred good AI assisted reports that led to corrections. Meaning: developers and researchers who use the tool as it's meant to work, as a tool, are leveraging it to improve curl. But they are not skipping the part of understanding the content of their reports, testing it, and only then submitting it.
- account42 9mo ago
  Technically true but that argument also won't let you bring your gun on a plane.
  - epolanski 9mo ago
    The purpose of a tool is important. Guns have no other purpose than doing harm. E.g. We don't blame cars, the tool, for driving into a gathering of people that can kill a dozen of them, we blame the driver. The purpose is transport, the same way LLMs for coding are a tool for assisting coding tasks.
    - account42 9mo ago
      We do actually keep cars out of areas with lots of people here. And the media headlines always refer to a "car" driving into people without mentioning the person behind the steering wheel. Whether that's the better than addressing the root issue is another question though. We also don't allow car use without a license. In the end what matters if allowing something is a net positive or not. Of course you can have more precise rules than just a blanket ban but when deciding and enforcing those rules is not free that also needs to be considered in the cost benefit analysis. Unless you can propose how projects can allow "good" contributions without spending more time on weeding out bad ones, a blanket ban makes sense.
    - burnt-resistor 9mo ago
      > The purpose of a tool is important. > Guns have no other purpose than doing harm. Objects don't have purposes or intent until people use them, and many objects have multiple reasonable and dual purposes. Objects can be used for net good and net harm. A bow and arrow isn't specifically for harming humans but can be used for such. Chainsaws and meat cleavers too. What would you like a machine gun-wielding terrorist to be stopped with? A strongly-worded letter? On the same token of reasonableness and rationality, it's unreasonable to give a toddler a towed howitzer that's ordinarily destined for Big Sandy Shoot.
dada78641 9mo ago
It has also really accelerated the army of hustlers who can't actually code but want to get a contributor badge on major repos to put on their resume. It's not like this sort of hustling didn't exist prior to LLMs but the volume has ballooned massively.
- mrguyorama 9mo ago
  Any system of cheaply generating mediocre quality inherently benefits spammers and grifters more than anyone else. Their biggest limiting factor is always the cost of generating mediocre content. Removing that barrier was the dumbest thing to do in the world.
TechSquidTV 9mo ago
I couldn't possibly disagree more. AI has created an entirely new way to contribute to open source. You can not, in addition to donating to the maintainers, donate your _tokens_ to fix bugs.
blibble 9mo ago
"AI" kills every part of open source it kills the incentive to contribute, the incentive to maintain, the incentive to learn, the incentive to collaborate, and the ability to build a business based on your work and it even kills the idea of traditional employment writing non-open source code all so three USian companies can race to the bottom to sell your former employer a subscription based on your own previous work

by jameslk 9mo ago

giancarlostoro 9mo ago

I wouldn't say open source code solely trained the models, surely there are CS courses and textbooks, official documentation as well as transcripts of talks and courses all factor in as well. On another note, regarding AI replacing most open source code. I forget what tool it was, but I had a need for a very niche way of accessing an old Android device it was rooted, but if I used something like Disk Drill it would eventually crap out empty files. So I found a GUI someone made, and started asking Claude to add things I needed for it to a) let me preview directories it was seeing and b) let me sudo up, and let me download with a reasonable delay (1s I think) which basically worked, I never had issues again, it was a little slow to recover old photos, but oh well. I debated pushing the code changes back into github, it works as expected, but it drifted from the maintainers own goals I'm sure.

ValveFan6969 9mo ago

"open source" and "business model" in the same sentence... next you're gonna tell me to eat pudding with a fork.

jameslk 9mo ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_models_for_open-source_software https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_models_for_open-sourc... I think you should try eating pudding with a fork next
- bigstrat2003 9mo ago
  I mean... not what the other poster meant, but https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sticky_toffee_pudding https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sticky_toffee_pudding exists and is absolutely delicious.
  - jameslk 9mo ago
    Flan is also a type of pudding (milk/eggs base) which can be ate with a fork. Other baked custards too
- robin_reala 9mo ago
  You’d hardly eat black pudding with a spoon. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_pudding https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_pudding
  - jjgreen 9mo ago
    Au contraire: https://www.anotherfoodblogger.com/recipes/potato-leek-black-pudding-soup/ https://www.anotherfoodblogger.com/recipes/potato-leek-black...
    - robin_reala 9mo ago
      I stand corrected!
Aeglaecia 9mo ago
i believe that the existence of not for profit organizations is a valid counterpoint to whatever your argument is
Grollicus 9mo ago
Just leaving this here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pudding_mit_Gabel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pudding_mit_Gabel
- em-bee 9mo ago
  already decades ago when we were kids eating pudding with a fork was a fun past time, and i am sure the idea is as old as pudding or forks themselves. i mean, the fact that it spread so fast shows that there are many who already practiced it. it's actually surprising it took this long to become a meme. heck, my cousin bet with me or let me compete eating pudding with chopsticks. (and that was long before i went to china) practically speaking, the only downside of using a fork (or chopsticks) is scraping the bottom when you are finishing up.
  - account42 9mo ago
    I think the meme is as much about a meetup with strangers to eat pudding as it is about using a fork to do it.
timeon 9mo ago
> next you're gonna tell me to eat pudding with a fork Depends if you are in UK or not.

bawolff 9mo ago

> they can be used to chip away at open source business models by implementing paid features and providing the support There are a lot of things to be sad about AI, but this is not it. Nobody has a right to a business model, especially one that assumes nobody will compete with you. If your business model relies on the rest of the world bring sucky so you can sell some value-added to open-core software, i'm happy when it fails.

sevenzero 9mo ago
Competition is extremely important yes. But not the kind of competition, backed by companies that have much bigger monetary assets, to overwhelm projects based on community effort just to trample it down. The FFMPEG Google stuff as an example.
anileated 9mo ago
When LLMs are based on stolen work and violate GPL terms, which should be already illegal, it's very much okay to be furious about the fact that they additionally ruin respective business models of open source, thanks to which they are possible in the guest place.
- charcircuit 9mo ago
  >“Free software” means software that respects users' freedom and community. Roughly, it means that the users have the freedom to run, copy, distribute, study, change and improve the software. https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html Being able to learn from the code is a core part of the ideology embedded into the GPL. Not only that, but LLMs learning from code is fair use.
  - jeroenhd 9mo ago
    That freedom for many free licenses comes with the caveat that you provide basic attribution and the same freedom to your users. LLMs don't (cannot, by design) provide attribution, nor do LLM users have the freedom to run most of these models themselves.

shubhamjain 9mo ago

I feel AI will have the same effect degrading Internet as social media did. This flood of dumb PRs, issues is one symptom of it. Other is AI accelerating the trend which TikTok started—short, shallow, low-effort content. It's a shame since this technology is brilliant. But every tech company has drank the “AI is the future” Kool-aid, which means no one has incentive to seriously push back against the flood of low-effort, AI-generated slop. So, it's going to be race to the bottom for a while.

sevenzero 9mo ago
It'll stop soonish. The industry is now financed by debt rather than monetary assets that actually exist. Tons of companies see zero gain from AI as its reported repeatedly here on HN. So all the LLM vendors will eventually have to enshittify their products (most likely through ads, shorter token windows, higher pricing and whatnot). As of now, not a sustainable business model thankfully. The only sad part is that this debt will hit the poorest people most.
- duskdozer 9mo ago
  I'm not so confident that "makes the product worse and makes them less money" is even enough to make them not do it anyway
killerstorm 9mo ago
I think "internet" needs a shared reputation & identity layer - i.e. if somebody offers a comment/review/contribution/etc, it should be easy to check - what else are their contributing, who can vouch for them, etc. Most of innovation came from web startups who are just not interest in "shared" anything: they want to be a monopoly, "own" users, etc. So this area has been neglected, and then people got used to status quo. PGP / GPG used to have web-of-trust but that sort of just died. People either need to resurrect WoT updated for modern era, or just accept the fact that everything is spammed into smithereens. Blaming AI and social media does not help.

pravj 9mo ago

Extending on the same line, we will see programs like Google Summer of Code (GSoC) getting a massive revamp, or they will stop operating. From my failed attempt, I remember that - Students had to find a project matching their interests/skills and start contributing early. - We used to talk about staying away from some projects with a low supply of students applying (or lurking in the GitHub/BitBucket issues) because of the complexity required for the projects. Both of these acted as a creative filter for projects and landed them good students/contributors, but it completely goes away with AI being able to do that at scale.

delfinom 9mo ago
GSoC 4 years ago removed the need for their to be actual students to apply. We got flooded with middle aged men working 9-5s applying. It was dumb and we stopped participating. Their incentives were literally "extra income" instead of learning or participating beyond that.
- 72deluxe 9mo ago
  But that sounds rewarding for the applicants, and the project?? The project gets code, and the guys get some money. Being a middle aged man working 9 to 5, I would enjoy contributing to a project I was interested in rather than the boring job at work. Are you saying you only wanted penniless youngsters to contribute, based entirely on their idealism?

GardenLetter27 9mo ago

How so? I think the Bazaar model has the most to gain - contributors can use LLMs to create PRs, and you can choose from a vast array of projects depending on how much you trust vibe coding.

meibo 9mo ago
Most of the drive-by LLM PRs we get are useless, waste our time and are super verbose on top of that. I don't review code like that anymore.

direwolf20 9mo ago

[dead]

epolanski 9mo ago

AI is not submitting the slop, people are. This is not a technology, but ethics and respect problem. From the same article: > Not all AI-generated bug reports are nonsense. It’s not possible to determine the exact share, but Daniel Stenberg knows of more than a hundred good AI assisted reports that led to corrections. Meaning: developers and researchers who use the tool as it's meant to work, as a tool, are leveraging it to improve curl. But they are not skipping the part of understanding the content of their reports, testing it, and only then submitting it.

account42 9mo ago
Technically true but that argument also won't let you bring your gun on a plane.
- epolanski 9mo ago
  The purpose of a tool is important. Guns have no other purpose than doing harm. E.g. We don't blame cars, the tool, for driving into a gathering of people that can kill a dozen of them, we blame the driver. The purpose is transport, the same way LLMs for coding are a tool for assisting coding tasks.
  - account42 9mo ago
    We do actually keep cars out of areas with lots of people here. And the media headlines always refer to a "car" driving into people without mentioning the person behind the steering wheel. Whether that's the better than addressing the root issue is another question though. We also don't allow car use without a license. In the end what matters if allowing something is a net positive or not. Of course you can have more precise rules than just a blanket ban but when deciding and enforcing those rules is not free that also needs to be considered in the cost benefit analysis. Unless you can propose how projects can allow "good" contributions without spending more time on weeding out bad ones, a blanket ban makes sense.
  - burnt-resistor 9mo ago
    > The purpose of a tool is important. > Guns have no other purpose than doing harm. Objects don't have purposes or intent until people use them, and many objects have multiple reasonable and dual purposes. Objects can be used for net good and net harm. A bow and arrow isn't specifically for harming humans but can be used for such. Chainsaws and meat cleavers too. What would you like a machine gun-wielding terrorist to be stopped with? A strongly-worded letter? On the same token of reasonableness and rationality, it's unreasonable to give a toddler a towed howitzer that's ordinarily destined for Big Sandy Shoot.

dada78641 9mo ago

It has also really accelerated the army of hustlers who can't actually code but want to get a contributor badge on major repos to put on their resume. It's not like this sort of hustling didn't exist prior to LLMs but the volume has ballooned massively.

mrguyorama 9mo ago
Any system of cheaply generating mediocre quality inherently benefits spammers and grifters more than anyone else. Their biggest limiting factor is always the cost of generating mediocre content. Removing that barrier was the dumbest thing to do in the world.

TechSquidTV 9mo ago

I couldn't possibly disagree more. AI has created an entirely new way to contribute to open source. You can not, in addition to donating to the maintainers, donate your _tokens_ to fix bugs.

blibble 9mo ago

"AI" kills every part of open source it kills the incentive to contribute, the incentive to maintain, the incentive to learn, the incentive to collaborate, and the ability to build a business based on your work and it even kills the idea of traditional employment writing non-open source code all so three USian companies can race to the bottom to sell your former employer a subscription based on your own previous work