I share your concerns, although we still see pretty similarly large and complex things that remain open source today.
I am astonished on a daily basis that my Linux computer is so close to the same experience as two operating systems put out by trillion dollar companies. It even does things that those commercial alternatives don’t do.
Also, if DeepSeek is truly putting out models with 1/10th the cost of Western competitors, and a fraction of the employee headcount, I think it implies that there will be a market for someone else to be in the space offering an alternative.
I think about how companies like IBM are so willing to contribute to Linux and give away those contributions for free because they are part of group of corporate sponsors that need an alternative to more dominant commercial players in the market.
Meta “gives away” React for similar reasons: it’s more beneficial for them to have it be a standard and be able to hire people who already know it.
It’s definitely harder to imagine the same ecosystem benefits of an AI model, but maybe it’s out there somewhere.
I could imagine some data center/VPS providers trying to sponsor something like that so that the big AI companies have less leverage over them.
Software is "free" though, which is why it has such a vibrant open source scene. One guy can code for a weekend and fill the screens of 5 million with something fun by Monday.
However, Once real costs are involved, participation tanks. Open source hardware, because it actually requires money to realize, has 1/10,000 the depth of open source software, if that.
Obviously everyone wants an open source AI, but virtually no one wants to fork over money, especially when the end result is others getting it free. A proper training run would require millions of people donating hundreds of dollars. Its not something one guy over a weekend can do...
Admittedly, I don’t know how the gap you’re describing gets closed.
With a lot of OSS it’s just free volunteer hours.
Compute isn’t free.
The closest thing I can think of is the idea that some group of businesses who can benefit from open models being around might fund that sort of thing. It’s just hard to imagine who they might be.
corporations and governments fund most linux development. for hardware companies software cost is a tax that decreases their revenue and profit, so Nvidia and AMD have strong incentives to support open source models, which they are, very actively.
> I share your concerns, although we still see pretty similarly large and complex things that remain open source today.
I feel like they aren't comparable. Open source software just requires human labor, and lots of people are willing and able to share that with the world for free.
Training AI requires capital, to build and power giant datacenters. People don't donate capital at that level.
> I am astonished on a daily basis that my Linux computer is so close to the same experience as two operating systems put out by trillion dollar companies. It even does things that those commercial alternatives don’t do.
We live in a world where you can "port" open source software to a new language (Rust) and close it up.
Linux will be ported to Rust and closed. It'll probably also be put under MIT/BSD because nobody cares anymore, but the companies will have their own internal private variants. And these will be the ones that see corporate development.
The value in open source is that it was a lot of concentrated value that was hard to copy, clone, or rip off. Now you can one shot a replacement with a few hundred bucks in tokens.
The economic value of Linux used to be billions of dollars. Soon it'll probably be closer to $0.
It's over.
> Meta “gives away” React for similar reasons: it’s more beneficial for them to have it be a standard and be able to hire people who already know it.
Nah, now you just one shot your thing. And you do it fast enough and with distribution and you win. Eventually human devs can't afford to keep competing and launching startups slower than a hyperscaler's own massively funded efforts.
This is the end of open source and the end of solo developers.
And when the ruthlessly effective models that can one shot entire business functions cost $1,000,000 per invocation. Oracle can afford to press the button to create, say, a new smartphone. But you cannot.
Just wait until devices start requiring trusted computing attestation. The ladder is going to be pulled up.
There’s a lot of merit to what you’re saying, but I don’t share that high level of pessimism.
The scenario you describe is basically that software is free as in beer now. We as a corporation don’t really need to bother using GPL/Apache licensed software because we can one-shot something of our own and not deal with with giving back contributions to the open source community.
But that highway goes both directions. That means that the open source community can also one-shot their software, build more with fewer resources, or it might even just devalue proprietary software even further.
If software is so easy to make, what’s the point of keeping it proprietary? I can’t charge you $100/year for Microsoft Word if I can tell Claude Opus 9.0 to clone it with $100 worth of tokens.
>>We don’t really need to bother using GPL/Apache licensed software because we can one-shot something of our own and not bother with giving back contributions.
Thinking of a open weight/source AI as gcc/perl was in the 1990s is more helpful line of approach to take here.
I am astonished on a daily basis that my Linux computer is so close to the same experience as two operating systems put out by trillion dollar companies. It even does things that those commercial alternatives don’t do.
Also, if DeepSeek is truly putting out models with 1/10th the cost of Western competitors, and a fraction of the employee headcount, I think it implies that there will be a market for someone else to be in the space offering an alternative.
I think about how companies like IBM are so willing to contribute to Linux and give away those contributions for free because they are part of group of corporate sponsors that need an alternative to more dominant commercial players in the market.
Meta “gives away” React for similar reasons: it’s more beneficial for them to have it be a standard and be able to hire people who already know it.
It’s definitely harder to imagine the same ecosystem benefits of an AI model, but maybe it’s out there somewhere.
I could imagine some data center/VPS providers trying to sponsor something like that so that the big AI companies have less leverage over them.
Or maybe all this optimism is a pipe dream?