We saw glimpses of a similar situation in the past when large cloud platforms cloned popular softwares in a not a very dissimilar manner. This led to the creation of "source available" as an alternative to open source that gained some traction of its own. But since this mostly affected a few large players, open source by and itself was large unaffected still supported by large volumes of individuals driven by passion, motivated towards their craft.
The concept of open source is itself something of an anomaly not seen in any other industry or at any other time in history. Partly fueled by an individual's desire to exhibit original work, and partly supported by the fact that code needs someone of an equal to work with, it still allowed authors to reap a net benefit while giving out their IP for free. LLMs have turned that picture over completely. It's not only trivial to derive, for all purposes, an exact copy of the IP while obscuring the source, it's also possible to maintain and operate the IP with a relatively low bar of expertise. But the other inconspicuous problem brought about by LLMs is that can you even claim original work any more? When no one believes that you wrote it yourself, what motivation remains to continue publishing as open source? With no net benefit to revealing your IP, will we see a revival to closed source distribution again?
At some point, you are paying rent to someone though, if you don't own the hardware. Tailscale only works because the broader Internet works and does routing. if you somehow displaced all the cloud services and solved auth,legal issues, etc. in a distributed efficient manner, I don't think that would remove the raw amount of bytes that needs to travel over the network. So maybe at that point "having an Internet connection" might be way more expensive, but the software itself is local? I don't know.
Open source gains from model assistance more than closed source.
> If there were some way to truly get the benefits of certain applications without centralizing on the cloud, that would be interesting.
Apps can be decentralized and on the cloud at the same time, open source and LLMs make it easier for smaller cloud providers to compete with the big ones. Also, open source can gain the most from diverse deployment options because there's no concern about piracy.
In short, contrary to the OP, now is the golden age of open source, maintenance becomes easier, bugs can be quickly squashed, deployment options galore. For some apps, like LLMs themselves, open source is the only safe option.
BTW, the OP is very confused about the "photopea incident", photopea is a closed source JS app, as much as JS can be closed source. The problem with photopea's author is the use JS instead of obfuscated emscripten or wasm, he also requested the wrong kind of takedown - one of the problems of closed source is that protecting it can become a hassle, especially for individuals and smaller companies in the age of LLMs - for them, it might not be worth the trouble anymore.
> Any project that sees a semblance of success will be cloned overnight many times over
The point of open source is that if your project is really good, people will not only clone it, but contribute their changes to it. Having a million forks is not productive and does not help the community at all, and, frankly, doesn't happen when the open source software is really useful: at some point people will get together and work for one of the "copies" to become the one everybody works with.
If your open source project gets forked and everybody starts contributing to the fork, maybe you should rethink how you approach your relationship with the community.
Most of my clients want a tech stack that is FOSS to the greatest extent possible since the cost of vendor lock-in can be crippling.
Explicit legal guarantees yes for sure, enterprise will pay for “FOSS as a service” since that comes with SLA’s and means they don’t need or don’t need as large an internal platform team.
But a system of systems composed of MIT and Apache-2.0 components… it might sound ironic but that commands a premium when it’s a proposal for a large enterprise. You’re giving them the guarantee that they can walk away if they want to and you can charge for that.
wasn't this always a risk with open source? also isn't that part of the point of open source? undoubtedly there are some forks out there that have become the new baseline. Besides, survival of the fittest. If some vibe-coded clone can compete, can manage updates, win market share, produce value superseding the original does that version not deserve it's share?
Personally I don't think it's all that trivial to maintain a large FOSS project, that vibe coded clones will simply not keep up because they were low effort and when they realize even with all the AI tools in the world it's still work to maintain a product they'll die off.
> what motivation remains to continue publishing as open source?
What motivation was there ever? prestige? money? accolades? Is that motivation actually gone?
Also closed source is not a protection anymore. look at Jev, they didn't even release the weights but everyone and their mother has a Jev-like model either out in the wild or in the works.
I don't mean to judge whether the outcome is better for society over all, but just wondering on the kind of impact it can have on the production side for now. Whether people are going to hesitate going open source and guard their IP in more ways than previously.