3 ms·

Yeah, agreed, but it was at least part of the moat. Competitors can see the model, the approach to market, etc. They still had to code up a better product. And

Yeah, agreed, but it was at least part of the moat. Competitors can see the model, the approach to market, etc. They still had to code up a better product. And part of the problem that the SaaS solves is that "I have this thing that I need to do. I can probably do it in software, but I don't know how. Can I buy that software?". Which is now becoming "Can I get an LLM to do it?" instead.

otterley 8mo ago
That’s where the “free as in puppy” comes in. It’s still a classic case of build vs buy, except building is now quicker than it used to be. You still have to ask, “suppose I did build it myself. Then what?”
- marcus_holmes 8mo ago
  Yeah. So then you get your own product, tailor-made to your organisation, that you own (well, it's public domain because LLM-generated, but same same), and that you can change whenever you want without having to deal with a SaaS company's backlog. If you don't like something in it, you fire up Claude Code and get it changed. There's also no danger of it being enshittified. Or of some twat of a product manager deciding to completely change the UI because they need to change something to prove their importance. Or of the product getting cancelled because it's not making enough money. Or of it getting sold to an evil corp who then sells your data to your competition. Or any of the other stupid shit we've seen SaaS companies pull over the past 20 years.
  - otterley 8mo ago
    Respectfully, I think you’re only considering upsides and not considering downsides, opportunity costs, and ongoing maintenance costs. This is not what smart managers do. Plus, just because you can build something cheaper with an LLM doesn’t mean you can operate it more cheaply than a specialist can. Economies of scale haven’t been obviated by AI. It’s useful to take an argument and take it to its logical extreme: I just don’t see every company in the world, large and small alike, building everything they depend on in-house, as though they were a prepper stocking up for Armageddon. That seems pretty fanciful on its face.
    - marcus_holmes 8mo ago
      I hear that, and yeah, it's a possible future but I'm not sure it's the certain one. The maintenance costs are kinda overrated: you fire up the LLM, point it at the code base and say "this needs fixing". I'd say that the maintenance costs of dealing with endless patches and fixes from a SaaS for features that you don't use is probably more onerous. And generally we're talking about the situation where the SaaS customer is a domain expert in their area of expertise, but that isn't software development. They can use a system incredibly well, they just can't develop it. They have in-house IT folks to maintain their computers, networks, etc, and they're really just adding a couple of people to develop and maintain some applications via LLM to that team. We're already seeing some of this, so it'll be interesting to see how far it goes.
  - rswail 8mo ago
    Why is it public domain because it's LLM-generated?
    - otterley 8mo ago
      As an attorney (and this is not legal advice), I would argue--and the U.S. Copyright Office has already stated--that machine-generated content is not copyrightable, because it's not a form of human creative expression. https://www.copyright.gov/ai/Copyright-and-Artificial-Intelligence-Part-2-Copyrightability-Report.pdf https://www.copyright.gov/ai/Copyright-and-Artificial-Intell... ("Copyright does not extend to purely AI-generated material, or material where there is insufficient human control over the expressive elements.") That said, the inquiry doesn't there. What happens next after the content is generated matters. If human creativity is then applied to the output such that it transforms it into something the machine didn't generate itself, then the resulting product might be copyrightable. See Section F on page 24 of the Report. Consider that a dictionary contains words that aren't copyrightable; but the selection of words an author select to write a novel constitutes a copyrightable work. It's just that in this case, the author is creatively constructing from much larger components than words. Lots of questions then obviously follow, like how much and what kind of transformation needs to be applied. But I think this is probably where the law is headed.
      - rswail 8mo ago
        Can the output of the service be licensed? A bit like the AGPL, you're licensed to use/reuse/derive new works. So if it's distributed outside of the license, that's subject to contractual penalties? I guess that's what all the "wrapper" SaaS businesses will do. Read that report, it defined the issues and the boundaries well, for the current generation of AI tools. As they develop and expand, it's going to get interesting, especially if robotics/3d printing etc get involved. If I use an Optimus Prime to help create art, similar to Andy Warhol's "factory", do I own the copyright on the completed work? If a person uses AI to generate work that ends up being patentable, are patents also not available?
        marcus_holmes 8mo ago

otterley 8mo ago

That’s where the “free as in puppy” comes in. It’s still a classic case of build vs buy, except building is now quicker than it used to be. You still have to ask, “suppose I did build it myself. Then what?”

marcus_holmes 8mo ago
Yeah. So then you get your own product, tailor-made to your organisation, that you own (well, it's public domain because LLM-generated, but same same), and that you can change whenever you want without having to deal with a SaaS company's backlog. If you don't like something in it, you fire up Claude Code and get it changed. There's also no danger of it being enshittified. Or of some twat of a product manager deciding to completely change the UI because they need to change something to prove their importance. Or of the product getting cancelled because it's not making enough money. Or of it getting sold to an evil corp who then sells your data to your competition. Or any of the other stupid shit we've seen SaaS companies pull over the past 20 years.
- otterley 8mo ago
  Respectfully, I think you’re only considering upsides and not considering downsides, opportunity costs, and ongoing maintenance costs. This is not what smart managers do. Plus, just because you can build something cheaper with an LLM doesn’t mean you can operate it more cheaply than a specialist can. Economies of scale haven’t been obviated by AI. It’s useful to take an argument and take it to its logical extreme: I just don’t see every company in the world, large and small alike, building everything they depend on in-house, as though they were a prepper stocking up for Armageddon. That seems pretty fanciful on its face.
  - marcus_holmes 8mo ago
    I hear that, and yeah, it's a possible future but I'm not sure it's the certain one. The maintenance costs are kinda overrated: you fire up the LLM, point it at the code base and say "this needs fixing". I'd say that the maintenance costs of dealing with endless patches and fixes from a SaaS for features that you don't use is probably more onerous. And generally we're talking about the situation where the SaaS customer is a domain expert in their area of expertise, but that isn't software development. They can use a system incredibly well, they just can't develop it. They have in-house IT folks to maintain their computers, networks, etc, and they're really just adding a couple of people to develop and maintain some applications via LLM to that team. We're already seeing some of this, so it'll be interesting to see how far it goes.
- rswail 8mo ago
  Why is it public domain because it's LLM-generated?
  - otterley 8mo ago
    As an attorney (and this is not legal advice), I would argue--and the U.S. Copyright Office has already stated--that machine-generated content is not copyrightable, because it's not a form of human creative expression. https://www.copyright.gov/ai/Copyright-and-Artificial-Intelligence-Part-2-Copyrightability-Report.pdf https://www.copyright.gov/ai/Copyright-and-Artificial-Intell... ("Copyright does not extend to purely AI-generated material, or material where there is insufficient human control over the expressive elements.") That said, the inquiry doesn't there. What happens next after the content is generated matters. If human creativity is then applied to the output such that it transforms it into something the machine didn't generate itself, then the resulting product might be copyrightable. See Section F on page 24 of the Report. Consider that a dictionary contains words that aren't copyrightable; but the selection of words an author select to write a novel constitutes a copyrightable work. It's just that in this case, the author is creatively constructing from much larger components than words. Lots of questions then obviously follow, like how much and what kind of transformation needs to be applied. But I think this is probably where the law is headed.
    - rswail 8mo ago
      Can the output of the service be licensed? A bit like the AGPL, you're licensed to use/reuse/derive new works. So if it's distributed outside of the license, that's subject to contractual penalties? I guess that's what all the "wrapper" SaaS businesses will do. Read that report, it defined the issues and the boundaries well, for the current generation of AI tools. As they develop and expand, it's going to get interesting, especially if robotics/3d printing etc get involved. If I use an Optimus Prime to help create art, similar to Andy Warhol's "factory", do I own the copyright on the completed work? If a person uses AI to generate work that ends up being patentable, are patents also not available?
      - marcus_holmes 8mo ago