I've never thought of open source as something you can make money on directly. It's hard to see how it benefits an IC economically, besides getting some recognition and a sense of pride.
Open source has always felt explicitly like a benefit for companies.
- They get free code, buy vs build is irrelevant when you can just pip install.
- Systems become largely homogenized, thus contributors are replaceable.
- They get an established pool of workers who know the technology already, no training required.
- They get free labor from contributors outside their organization maintaining their dependencies for them in perpetuity.
It's a great deal for employers! Especially if they forbid their employees from contributing back! If you work out the game theory, there's literally no reason for a company to do anything but sit back and siphon the benefits for themselves.
This doesn't really change with LLMs, it just makes the end game much more explicit. The goal was always to capture the intellectual output of open source contributors for private profit. Always. Now that it's actually happening, who's really shocked?
To add: This is okay in early organizations. In larger organizations, the risk of malicious code entering your systems is much greater. So I think FOSS benefits small companies more than large companies, which seems good.
Open source has always felt explicitly like a benefit for companies.
- They get free code, buy vs build is irrelevant when you can just pip install.
- Systems become largely homogenized, thus contributors are replaceable.
- They get an established pool of workers who know the technology already, no training required.
- They get free labor from contributors outside their organization maintaining their dependencies for them in perpetuity.
It's a great deal for employers! Especially if they forbid their employees from contributing back! If you work out the game theory, there's literally no reason for a company to do anything but sit back and siphon the benefits for themselves.
This doesn't really change with LLMs, it just makes the end game much more explicit. The goal was always to capture the intellectual output of open source contributors for private profit. Always. Now that it's actually happening, who's really shocked?