Baldur Bjarnason
“The slow evaporation of the free/open source surplus”
https://www.baldurbjarnason.com/2024/the-slow-evaporation-of-the-foss-surplus/
Where I try to explain, as succinctly as I can (which isn’t that succinct), why I’m worried about where FOSS is heading
Eaton
@audunmb @baldur the conflict between “free as in beer” and “free as in puppies” is real
Audun
@baldur Good post. This has been a flaw with FOSS for a long time. You can't build a sustainable model on pure voluntarism. FOSS is a great idea, but it either needs public funding or a model where the users pay for the development. There are a few companies that rely on FOSS and also contributes to it's development, (ie the user pays model), but way too many just treat it as free (as in beer) software.
Public funding is probably a more reliable route. It could be a variant of user pay along with the "public money, public code"-principle, but (some) software should be treated as infrastructure that needs public investment.
Paul Cantrell
@baldur
Compelling.
This side branch deserves its own writeup:
“Some are reaching for LLM-generated code before they even look for an OSS project, both disconnecting those projects from opportunities to grow a sustainable community and nullifying the strategic advantage of having made an OSS solution for a problem. Note that the models are originally trained on that OSS.”
Paul Cantrell
@baldur
That part is anecdotal, and it’s an open question how long lived it is. There’s also a family of theoretical questions: What are models trained on once people start using models to write code? Do they propagate expertise from experts to newcomers? Do they create a kind of model in breeding and degenerate? Do they •prevent• the creation of new tools?
I have serious doubts about the sustainability of even the current very mixed success of LLMs for code.
Baldur Bjarnason
@inthehands It’s still purely anecdotal on my part, based on conversations and observations. It’s still to early to be sure, but I think that for some people, LLMs are fulfilling demand that OSS used to. The question is just how big that group is.
Paul Cantrell
@baldur
A thought experiment I like to mull over: if LLMs had been available before high-level languages, trained on •assembly•, and if we take as a given the extremely dubious assumption that people go all in on LLM-based coding for all those years, what would programming look like today?
The answer I keep coming back to is that code would be utterly impenetrable to humans, almost as opaque to us as the human brain but far less reliable.
Baldur Bjarnason
@inthehands Oh, I see. Yeah, those are excellent questions that are well worth digging into. I have similar doubts overall.
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