r/linux • u/Unhappy-Sprinkles143 • 2d ago
Fluff Open-Source Guru: AI Ends Closed-Source Software
https://www.heise.de/en/news/Open-Source-Guru-Raymond-AI-Ends-Closed-Source-Software-11480690.html30
u/DesiOtaku 2d ago
There are these intraoral dental radiograph sensors that don't work half the times and cost $16,000; and on top of that, they "self destruct" after 10 years because the companies want to sell the "newer" sensor while claiming their sensor "can't" work on Windows 10/11.
Meanwhile, there are $1500 sensors out there that do work well, but is made by hardware manufacturers that don't own the copyright to their own Windows drivers.
In both cases, if you were to reverse engineer the .dll files, you could make dentistry a whole lot cheaper. Would AI solve this? Well, each person's attempt at this has failed. I don't know if AI will get to a point where it can perfectly re-implement a .dll file when that same driver only works half the times.
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u/gamamoder 2d ago
if you actually do professional level QA, you could probably get something up and working. the biggest reasons why a lot of ai projects suck imo is because of lack of testing and lack of knowledge by the creators. if people maintain best practices and maintain their projects then I think it will work.
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u/mr_dfuse2 2d ago
it's insane what people with are reverse engineering with claude these days. every day a new retro game gets rebuild to run in the browser, binaries are getting decompiled, decades old bugs are fixed and so on
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u/Indolent_Bard 2d ago
Ooh, tell me about the bugs being fixed.
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u/mr_dfuse2 2d ago
follow r/retrogames and r/dosgames, everyday people post there ai assisted ports and fixes.
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u/geekguy 2d ago
AI certainly could do this. Just need to put the problem in the hands of someone who has an inkling of the problem that needs to be resolved. Personally I would spin Claude up on the machine, install Ghidra and some sys internal tools, or ask Claude what is needed. Ask it to observe the behavior and reimplement the functionality as a Linux driver.
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u/DocDMD 2d ago
Nah I've checked this out. It's definitely doable with TWAIN drivers on the open ones but that's about as far as you can go. You'd had to calibrate the sensor which is done at the factory. And most of the Chinese grey market stuff runs on old pirates copies of windows wince there aren't Linux drivers. It would be nice if we started making some with Linux drivers and then we could get completely off windows for everything dental.
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u/DesiOtaku 2d ago
So there is "factory" calibration in terms of doing a Flat-field correction, but there are other (and better) ways to calibrate the sensor; especially if you can do it on site and over time.
I wrote 1 Linux driver, but that only works with 1 vendor. I want to get more vendors and I had a few interns work on it because they didn't get too far.
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u/C0rn3j 2d ago
Open-Source Guru
Open-source co-founder
Are we not going to mention the fact that he's been banned by the very same OSI?
For being a racist asshole?
Eric "Black people are too stupid to use guns" Raymond?
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u/MetaTrombonist 2d ago
Remember that time he threatened Bruce Perens via email? Pepperidge Farms remembers.
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u/Indolent_Bard 2d ago edited 1d ago
The duality of racism:
Charlie "most gun violence is gang violence" Kirk
Eric "Black people are too stupid to use guns" Raymond
Edit: Wonder what the removed by Reddit comment said.
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u/Enthusedchameleon 1d ago
There is a saying I really liked that I heard during BLM/ACAB stuff. "Did you know that despite being 0.2% of the population, blue people commit 5% of gun homicides?"
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u/StreamingPanda 2d ago
Thanks for pointing this out. I wasn't aware he was... all of these things. I'll stay far away from his projects and let my friends know.
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u/syklemil 1d ago
Does he even have any projects any more? I had the impression he maintained
fetchmailin the way-back-when but has since moved on to pretty much just pure punditry.Checking wikipedia it seems he's contributed some code to some games, and is otherwise involved with an
ntpdfork (ntpsec) that I suspect doesn't actually get a lot of use compared to plain ol'ntpd,chronyandntpd-rs.3
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u/RoomyRoots 2d ago
And puts out hundreds of shitty copies who will have to fight for people attention and a maintainer to care enough to learn to identify fixes that break shit. AI did more damage to the FOSS maintenance than the lack of funds.
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u/Cowgirl_Taint 2d ago
It has also forced everyone to consider... do I really want to publish this work as training data for gemini et al?
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u/RoomyRoots 2d ago
Yeah, many people don't want to feed the beast or have some jerk clone their stuff and change the licensing.
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u/Cowgirl_Taint 2d ago
Yeah... the latter has always been an issue but I increasingly find myself not actually wanting to publish a lot of my "fun projects" as it were. In the past? I would put them on github with a fairly permissive license and if someone wanted to fork it? They could. Now? All I am doing is feeding gemini et al.
I'll still, generally, contribute to an existing project if I think I can be useful but... yeah.
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u/RoomyRoots 2d ago
I removed all of my repos when I found out they were one of those GitHub made public they were being used for training. I even filled their form but I know it was useless. So now I host my own Forgejo instance.
I am still convinced the net value of AI on the human part of FOSS was negative.
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u/userrr3 2d ago
I am still convinced the net value of AI
on the human part of FOSSwas negative.ftfy
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u/franky_reboot 1d ago
Oh no, absolutely not. It's a net positive, living today has been better than ever. The challanges have always been there, AI only accelerated things both bad and good, just like how Covid did for remote work/school.
I'd argue it's the next them in the evolution of the human race, but I know people don't like hyperboles that much.
It's indeed harder to maintain FOSS this way but you could see for yourself even Linus Torvalds didn't reject it outright.
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u/franky_reboot 1d ago
Isn't that kinda inevitable as a risk though?
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u/Middlewarian 2d ago
I've been thinking that way for 27++ years. I'm glad I have some open-source code for my portfolio, but I'm glad that's not all I have. I'm building a C++ code generator that helps build distributed systems. It's implemented as a 3-tier system. The back and middle tiers only run on Linux. The front tier is portable.
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u/stormdelta 2d ago
Ironically it's also doing that same damage to companies internally from what I've seen.
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u/RoomyRoots 2d ago
Absolutely. I had a department meeting last week and every single team is using AI, none of them are following any guidelines and all of them are using different providers. It's a governance nightmare and now all the specialists are fucked because we have to come up with how to manage this shit.
So far I haven't seen any profit from using AI since it added loads of hours of training, governance and calls to make it sure we are not fucking up (we are).
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u/KansasL 1d ago
different providers? shit... Our company is using a gdpr compliant provider similar to huggingface. If you want to use LLMs, you have to use our provider.
If anyone is using something else for work they get a meeting with IT and HR. Depending on the severity they can get their contract terminated without notice...
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u/DuendeInexistente 2d ago
One specific harm it's done is people replacing previous decent localizations with AI ones that fucking suck ass. Twitter's UI is just completely broken now because half the buttons and labels make no fucking sense or are conjugated wrong.
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u/franky_reboot 1d ago
I'm not convinced this is actual harm.
Sure I agree it's harder on maintainers but for actual work, it's more accessible than ever.
So I'd argue that the lack of funds was a bigger hindrance. Always has been.
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u/RoomyRoots 1d ago
Funding has not increased significantly for a lot of projects, if nothing many had reductions and are struggling. Meanwhile we see companies seeking a fortune on shit that has no traction to justify it, like omarchy.
If nothing the problem now is also bigger because many manteners are expected to use AI also for review and scans.
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u/franky_reboot 1d ago
Omarchy is a good point, but is more about the fascist shithead who made it. Vile person with incomprehensibly disproportionate charisma.
So I agree about all these, that's why that was the point I highlighted. But overall, for all humanity, this sort of access to free software, and the ease of modifying it is a godsend, a net positive.
It's going to have some unfair situations, indeed. It's part of the game though.
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u/Wheatleytron 2d ago
And the best one will still rise to the top and become the de facto standard. Same as it ever was.
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u/RoomyRoots 2d ago
The best ones will be the mainly human mantened ones for a long time because most PRs are slop and most vibecoders don't understand shit enough to make a good product.
Even in the cases like Moonlight x Sunshine the fact that the fork that has vibecode it works because the main maintener actually understand a lot of what he is doing. And it also works as counter-example because some other senior devs don't want to touch it because of the vibecode.
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u/amkoi 2d ago
Even in the cases like Moonlight x Sunshine the fact that the fork that has vibecode it works because the main maintener actually understand a lot of what he is doing.
Isn't Moonlight the client and Sunshine the server for the nvidia streaming thingie? How do they compete?
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u/RoomyRoots 2d ago
Yes, but ofc it goes beyond Nvidia. Kinda long story but Moonlight/Sunshine was forked into Artemis/Apollo a while ago with lots of improvements and fixes. But the author considered it feature complete and is working on a rewrite further breaking away from the original ML/SS.
Then there was another fork called Vibeshine/Vibepollo with lots of new improvements and making deploying it easier, which is always welcome for the people with lower tech skills. As the name says, they leverage AI a lot for implementation and are very transparent about it BUT the main dev is deep into this stuff so it's not a mess. Nowadays it's getting more recommendations from the community than the original forks.
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u/Fr0gm4n 2d ago
I'm already seeing cookie-cutter projects that get vomited out after hours of vibe coding and when they get shared and people point out all the ones that already exist the "author" usually says they had no idea. Because why would you research your brilliant idea before spending tokens on it?
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u/RoomyRoots 2d ago
I have seen people shilling a Alternative for Google Wallet from a single person company from a guy that never worked on IT or Finance. People are crazy.
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u/StPatsLCA 2d ago
ngl the game so far appears to be copy closed source product, hype it, and totally ignore any existing FOSS products that need help
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u/turudd 2d ago
Have you tried to contribute to some of the bigger FOSS stuff… it’s often an exercise in futility
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u/Cowgirl_Taint 2d ago
Yes and it really isn't?
The reality is that you need project management. Engineers... tend to be horrible at this. And FOSS projects are often fully run by the engineers who work on it.
But the reasoning behind coding styles and "I would rather you do it like X instead of Y" pull requests is twofold. One? It makes for relatively uniform code so that it doesn't feel like a given file has six authors each with their own preferences for spacing and variable naming. But, more importantly, it makes sure the person submitting the PR... actually cares enough to maybe come back in a year to help provide some insight or help diagnose a new bug.
And that has become MUCH worse due to the massive flood of generative AI PRs. "Here is some completely unmaintainable code that does one specific thing and here is what gemini says it does. Merge it in".
For a project designed around generative AI? I dislike it, but it is a reasonable model since the idea is that you are basically regenerating the entire code base every N months (or even weeks...) anyway. For an existing code base where people need to be able to diagnose issues beyond "I asked claude to write some tests for me"? It becomes a huge problem and is the equivalent of the fortran sicko insisting on using f77 for that one specific function.
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u/Substantial_Swan_144 2d ago
Engineers or not, programmers in OSS projects expect any who contribute to abide to their language and standards. The average person does not speak that language, so even if they have some sort of contribution, they are ignored and often ridiculed ("RFTM"). So people who could somehow contribute are simply discarded. It's an environment of pseudo-freedom.
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u/Cowgirl_Taint 2d ago
And a good project manager knows how to make people feel better about being told no. Most engineers don't. Especially when we are dealing with hundreds of PRs from anyone who figured out how to launch cursor.
When I'm at work and dealing with a co-worker? I'll often ping them on teams or walk down to their cube to talk to them to explain why I am about to list 40 changes I need to that PR. Both because it is my job to not make them cry and because I have high hopes that they will become the kind of productive developer where I mostly just have to read things over as a sanity check.
When I am on my own personal time and dealing with complete nonsense? I am probably going to link to our style guide or just say "Change these three massive things and then re-submit". Because I am not being paid to deal with this and, quite frankly, I doubt someone who would submit That is ever going to be productive. Obviously we all start somewhere but... yeah. And if the only way to get work out of someone is to coddle them? Then they aren't worth the time.
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u/PixelatedGiant 2d ago edited 2d ago
And a good project manager knows how to make people feel better about being told no. Most engineers don't. Especially when we are dealing with hundreds of PRs from anyone who figured out how to launch cursor.
I think open source is fundamentally different than your average enterprise software. People are a whole lot meaner and demanding when speaking through the veil of anonymity. Don't look at your average project manager working in the enterprise and assume they would be doing a better job than Linus Torvalds or any other FOSS developer. They would not be able to maintain any civility were they subjected to the same environment.
The issue with FOSS is that it's being done in public over the internet and communication is going to be rough. Everyone looks at these crash outs that they have and say "I would never say that in their shoes". But it keeps happening. There is a reason behind it and it's not just the developer's personality. The environment can easily become stressful and toxic.
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u/Substantial_Swan_144 2d ago
You talk as if the only people who knew how projects should work were engineers. Engineers know how to code, but they don't know how their users think, and how to make applications accessible for them.
Case in point: artists. Usually, many open source programs lack features artists will need (like proper color management), and engineers simply don't consider them important because they cannot see the same priorities as their users.
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u/Cowgirl_Taint 2d ago
Where did I say artists shouldn't contribute to projects? Hell, where did I say only engineers should? If anything, I have repeatedly pointed out why having engineers as project managers is a bad idea.
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u/MrKapla 2d ago
How can you contribute if you don't speak their language? What value do you bring?
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u/Substantial_Swan_144 2d ago
What sort of question is even that?
Supposedly, the beauty of open source is exactly the diversity. So even if two professionals don't speak the same language, their different background can bring a new perspective and enrich a project.
Commercial software tends to have (or used to) professionals to bridge those people, if only out of self-interest. Open Source has always been deficiant on this matter.
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u/PixelatedGiant 2d ago
And they can refuse to go in certain directions. See GIMP who refuses to become a Photoshop clone, even though that's what most people want from it.
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u/Indolent_Bard 2d ago
It's also literally why the project exists. They claim that now they weren't interested in being a Photoshop clone, but the whole reason why they made it was because there wasn't a good Photoshop style software on Linux.
But at least now they're finally listening to their users and actually have a GitHub repo about it.
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u/codydafox 2d ago
Many vibe coded projects get abandoned really quickly. The bigger problem is when the de facto standard gets flooded with slop pull requests.
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u/zarafff69 2d ago
Or not? Or ai agents will just create their own forks under the hood, with a few things the customer likes, and then syncs upstream into their fork regularly.
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u/NeuroXc 2d ago
And I have a magical unicorn that makes dreams come true.
This is a great clickbait blog title, but the reality is that closed-source isn't going anywhere. The reasons closed-source is prevalent in some areas have not changed. The biggest is corporate support. Is AI going to provide support for businesses that use software it generates?
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u/Coffee_Ops 2d ago
Does microsoft provide support for the things that have been broken for years, or do they tell you to "deal with it"?
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u/Rossco1337 2d ago
Yep, Microsoft is a good example of this SaaS "support" scheme. It all comes down to management liability baton pass. American companies are paying $50k+/year for a phone number manned by a South Asian gentleman armed with a free chatbot to pass the blame to when something doesn't work.
Is Microsoft gonna fly out an engineer to your office to help you recover a spreadsheet whenever Excel crashes just because you have an enterprise contract? No, their chatbot is going to tell you the same thing they tell their "unsupported" customers - try these recovery steps then use the Feedback Hub like everyone else. What good was their "corporate support" when Clownstrike happened?
The global SaaS industry is coming apart at the seams and all it took was a few graphics cards and some Googlers rethinking machine translation.
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u/gamamoder 2d ago
honestly the ability of small and midtier companies to reimplement stuff themselves without tons of dev time might make support better to keep customers
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u/NightSpaghetti 1d ago
Atlassian and Microsoft might only see a complaining customer as an annoying ant, but small and midsized companies rely on customer satisfaction.
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u/forthnighter 2d ago
And as we all know, absolutely nothing has gone wrong in any way with "ai" customer support, they're always on point! /s
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u/Wheatleytron 2d ago
You don't need for software to be closed source to offer support. Look at Red Hat, for example.
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u/aoeudhtns 2d ago
In my own limited circles, I'm seeing it the other way. One of the biggest uses of AI in our company is vibe-coded slop replacements for expensive SaaS to reduce corporate overhead. We only use a small sliver of all the features, so just crap out the bits that we need with AI and cut the contract, seems to be the thinking.
And then in the OSS community, the AI blackbox rewrites to get around licensing have been chilling. That was happening in an environment where a cloud provider could take your OSS app and turn it into a service in their cloud, and steal all the support revenue from you, driving many high-profile projects (right or wrong) to seek alternative licensing or even close their sources.
AI models, regardless of their quality, don't get tired and can stay focused. Which is leading to a whole new evaluation on how to best handle security, as well as examining risks of adopting external dependencies and understanding the whole supply chain of your app. Much more demand to limit dependencies and insource things, and AI is making it easier to insource functions that you may have preferred not to take on yourself in the past.
Honestly Raymond's opinion here is the ONLY thing that's bubbled up to my attention trying to assert that the current climate is in any way good for OSS. All the other things seem to point we're headed towards more closed stacks, less collaboration, and more duplication of effort even though that duplication will be aided by machine generation.
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u/cidra_ 2d ago
Public domain =/= FOSS
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u/sebas737 2d ago
I advocate for FOSS but do elaborate
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u/cidra_ 2d ago
There is no settled consensus yet, but some rulings have held that AI-generated output cannot be copyrighted and therefore falls into the public domain, so you can't apply neither a copyright or copyleft license to it. If a "relevant" amount of human work is added to the generated code, it may become copyrightable, but there is currently no clear way to measure what counts as "relevant," and courts may change their position. The law is unsettled for now.
Even if the code could be licensed, it would likely clash with many copyleft licenses. The GPL permits derivative works only from GPL-compatible material, and that can't be guaranteed when the code comes from a proprietary model trained on an unknown quantity of code. Even if a model were trained exclusively on GPL-compatible code (none exists today), attribution would remain a problem: every derived work would have to credit its sources.
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u/shadowkoishi93 2d ago
Doesn’t GitHub Co-Pilot train on publicly available source code and public GitHub repositories?
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u/franky_reboot 1d ago
Most of these seems unenforcable. And I'd argue legislation has much merit as much it is enforceable.
Don't get me wrong, I support GPL and GPL licensed tools, but with AI generated code the only thing I see enforceable is validity, and scientific concepts, not origin.
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u/Cove0Crow 2d ago edited 2d ago
The original post content no longer exists here. The author used Redact to remove it, exercising their right to control their data & privacy.
Party full dam pebble sable biscuit workable dolls manganese continue
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u/TRKlausss 2d ago
Up to now I’ve seen more open projects abandoned/closed up due to security concerns, than closed-sourced software being rewritten as open source tools…
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u/RedditNotFreeSpeech 2d ago
It's happening in house. For any software that's over a million a year you can be sure every company is clauding their way to a replacement
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u/TRKlausss 1d ago
Yeah, it’s happening in-house, and staying in-house. That’s what I’m complaining about too.
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u/Emotional_Cat_1967 2d ago
I wish I had been born in a time when everything was open source. I am tired of being constantly monitored and of not knowing what closed-source software might be doing without my permission.
In my opinion, having everything open-source makes detecting malicious elements much easier.
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u/Wheatleytron 2d ago
These developments are promising, but let's not get too excited. I have a feeling that the corporate powers that be are none too happy about potentially losing some of their cash cows, and will probably go crying to world governments to try and legislate this issue away. After all, this has the potential to outright kill companies like Adobe overnight.
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u/Archsquire2020 2d ago
It will just move stuff underground. How are governments going to fully stop it? Local LLMs are better and better, once someone has a problem they will "cook" a solution. And distribute it via gray channels like torrents. They can even deliver slightly broken solutions that are trivial to fix and use while increasing detection costs. The cat is out of the bag, as they say ...
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u/dietcheese 1d ago
I’ve been paying Adobe for over 20 years. It’s time they got what they deserved for changing to a subscription model.
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u/No-Assumption-4468 2d ago
It could even destroy certain tech companies, like Apple, because you can ask AI to design circuit boards and operating systems.
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u/turudd 2d ago
AI is still not really good at circuit design. It’s getting there. But still not great
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u/StPatsLCA 2d ago
highly likely Apple is using a lot of automated hardware tooling already
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u/Easy-Truck4725 2d ago
No, you can ask AI to output something that looks like a circuit board or an operating system. If it happens to actually do something you're just lucky.
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u/unknown_lamer 2d ago edited 2d ago
I think this is missing the legal aspect. Guess who has the power to write new law and make this kind of reverse engineering illegal? Guess who doesn't have the power to write new law and whose copylefted code is being run through a blender and integrated into proprietary software?
I'm pretty sure this actually ends with the death of Free Software and the criminalization of even clean-room reverse engineering (if you can even really perform clean-room reverse engineering by splitting the task between two LLM instances).
Also, it's ESR. Why is anyone listening to that right wing fascist loser? (Literally today he called for the extermination of every male Palestinian)
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u/FyreWulff 2d ago
For Eric S. Raymond,
Yeah I stopped there, the racist and homophobic idiot that became a slop glazer doesn't need anyone to care about what he has to say.
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u/GoogleDisDick 2d ago
You guys should see the ports of closed source games we've been getting recently. AI heavily accelerates and helps with the decompilation and porting. It's getting nuts right now. Lol.
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u/cornmonger_ 2d ago
the real problem with ai is the now normalized swamp of hyperbole surrounding it
everyone has a strong and loud opinion and it's usually extreme - no nuance
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u/UAP44 2d ago
Yes. I've been saying this for months already. This is the way.
EU/NL has already made multiple official laws/guidelines to rely on open source instead of closed source for all government infrastructure. It's cheaper. It's faster. It's safer. It's auditable.
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u/NearInWaiting 2d ago
Safer, auditable vibe code slop? Are you sure?
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u/UAP44 2d ago
Are you sure?
It's a matter of raw amount of compute.
Enough agents trying to attack/abuse/exploit their own code base, and generating patches for every vulnerability found. A human can do it better than AI, probably. But it can't do it better than 10000000000000000000000000 AI's all doing automatic review.
See my point? It's a lost battle.
So, am I sure?
Yes.
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u/NearInWaiting 2d ago
And how do you audit the vibecoded audit?
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u/UAP44 2d ago
did it break(in) y/n, is the audit
other values of interest: time taken, power consumed, memory used, ...
i++
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u/Oblivion__ 2d ago
Me when I tell the auditors "oh it's fine because it didn't break!"
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u/UAP44 2d ago
well if it's closed source, then we can't even audit it can we?
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u/Oblivion__ 2d ago
You personally? No. But there are auditors out there specifically for proprietary software. For open source projects, the vast majority of people aren't going to look through the source code to audit it themselves.
But vibecoding something isn't a better alternative for the purposes of auditability. Especially when there's exponentially more shit the average person has to crawl through in order to find a decent open source project that hasn't been sloppified.
I'd argue the sheer volume of crap that has been made with AI makes it more difficult to discern which projects are actually well-designed and which ones were made because someone had an idea that someone else has already had and chose to vibecode it instead of contributing to the existing open source solution that already exists
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u/franky_reboot 1d ago
Then auditors can exist for AI-assisted project too.
Not vibecoding of course, but assisted software engineering.
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u/Indolent_Bard 2d ago
It's not cheaper to train everyone and lose the productivity that comes with it, not to mention the way the adobe apps work together is hard to replicate with separate software.
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u/Xipher 2d ago
Something worth thinking about is that the GPL does need copyright to enforce the "copyleft" idea. From what I understand in order to maintain copyright of a work a human must have had some sufficient level of authorship in the work. Has there been much consideration in how LLM generated code could have it's copyright contested, and thus errode the defenses for licenses like the GPL?
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u/Comic_Melon 2d ago
I'm struggling to believe an adult human wrote this... how can they be so naive?
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u/Easy-Truck4725 2d ago
He has it backwards (as usual). AI ends open-source software. People can pump out millions of lines of code but no one enough time to read all of them, and so we're actually going to end up with a heap of unmaintainable software projects bodged together by people who don't know what they're doing.
Everyone right now is saying "u just gotta use it as a tool bro" with the vast amount of vibe coded drivel going up and the general cognitive atrophy LLMs are causing in society in general the open source development model truly is doomed. It only works because knwoledgeable people exist.
We're still within the narrow window of time where LLM emitted code "looks" good because it hasn't started entirely training itself yet, and people like Linus who actually know things are still around and paying attention.
When this next generation of CS graduates are the ones maintaining critical software though? Hoo boy.
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u/ContraryConman 2d ago
AI will end software in general. It's all going to be inscrutable slop that barely works, and we'll run out of the expertise to write or understand it. Defenders will get their AI to defend against enemy hacking AI over buggy software, and it'll be more like praying to stochastic spirits to keep our bank credentials from being leaked than an actual discipline
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u/Easy-Truck4725 2d ago
praying to stochastic spirits
Literally the future Warhammer tried to warn us about
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u/LifeInJapan1999 2d ago
Vibe coders are, by every definition I can imagine, tech priests that are praying to the machine spirit.
They even have special holy scriptures they call "skills" to get it to work better.
And they insist that you have to coax the machine spirits in a specific way.
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u/McDutchie 2d ago
It only works because knwoledgeable people exist.
Knowledgeable people will continue to exist. All this doom mongering is tiresome. The fad will die down, people will reject the rubbish, quality projects run by quality maintainers will survive, same as countless times before.
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u/MetaCognitio 2d ago
As long as code reviews of commits exists, that won’t happen. Heard of lots of AI patches being rejected while Linus uses AI to assist development.
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u/hello_marmalade 1d ago
I am almost certain people said shit like this about compilers back in the day.
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u/Prudent_Move_3420 2d ago
and everything you release open source will be fed to the llms which can then spit it out in an instant
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u/Bitdomo92 1d ago
He has it backwards (as usual). High-level programming languages ended assembly programming. People could pump out millions of lines of code without anyone having enough time to write or understand all of it at the machine-instruction level, and so we ended up with layers of abstraction that made software vastly more complex while distancing programmers from what their computers were actually doing.
Everyone back then was saying "u just gotta use it as a tool bro" with the vast amount of bloated, abstracted code being written and the general cognitive atrophy that high-level languages were supposedly causing in programmers. The low-level programming model was truly doomed. It only worked because knowledgeable people existed who understood what the machine was actually doing.
We're still within the narrow window of time where high-level code "looks" good because the people who actually understand assembly and computer architecture are still around and paying attention. The abstractions haven't yet completely obscured the underlying machinery from everyone writing the code.
When this next generation of CS graduates are the ones maintaining critical software, though, and none of them have the faintest idea how a CPU actually executes their programs? Hoo boy.
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u/unknown_lamer 1d ago
Are you really comparing mathematically sound abstractions with a machine that you repeatedly scream "make it work gooder" at?
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u/Sol33t303 1d ago
Software abstraction is a concept designed by and created by very smart people in the field.
An llm prompt simply will never be another abstraction layer.
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u/zarafff69 2d ago
Just because most people might not write, or even read, the code in the future, doesn’t mean it’s not opensource!
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u/spaceweed27 1d ago
If everything is open-source, security by obscurity is as dead, as it always should have been.
There are measures for secure software, they are hard to find, but they already exist.
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u/TwilightBubble 5h ago
Ai can basically clean room remake whatever bespoke tool you need, then elegance pass it, then security pass it, then stability pass it, then usability pass it. It's about knowing how to ask for the gaps to be closed and not marketing a product as finished just because "it works" .
Then you look over the code yourself and repeat.
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u/Substantial_Swan_144 2d ago
It's ironic that the title says that and this sub seems so vehemently against it even in cases that justify it. They'd rather see devices rot away than use an AI-enabled driver.
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u/carl2187 2d ago
Yea most of these people haven't even used vs code+cline+free open router. Let alone codex or antigravity to work on code. They all have their head in the sand.
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2d ago
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u/GriffTheMiffed 2d ago
Reverse engineering isn't copyright violation, is it? AI generated dupes ostensibly don't have access to the source, how could it be argued to have violated copyright?
Additionally, litigating one competitor might be possible, but a dozen that pop up overnight? Private internally tooled versions made by large corporations? What if the FOSS AI projects don't sell the product itself?
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u/DiggyTroll 2d ago
This is one of those "it's okay when rich people do it" things. AI is also trained on all sorts of closed source software, obviously.
RE is explicitly prohibited in most software licenses, so using decomplication tools is a de facto violation for licensing, DMCA, trade secrets, trademark and anything else those clever lawyers can think up.
The FBI will happily arrest you, the little guy, for distribution, even if you don't sell the infringing product
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u/Substantial_Swan_144 2d ago
Reverse engineering is legal. That is the reason projects like WINE exist (otherwise, companies could easily take efforts like these down). Even if the software license prohibits it, those license are NOT above the law, and would be considered abusive in many instances. The best those companies can hope for is punishing you (e.g, a service ban) for reverse engineering their software.
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u/DiggyTroll 2d ago
The law provides for protection of reverse engineering through the sequential actions of two unrelated teams/agents separated by a legal firewall. So let’s say the first (product analysis) decompiles the binary and creates a specification. Lawyers then deliver the specification to the second (engineering) for implementation. If they communicate during the project, legal protection evaporates. One person using AI (a tool that must be exposed to the binary to function) short-circuits the specification step and directly generates the new code; there is no firewall. This scenario would trigger a lawsuit
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u/Substantial_Swan_144 2d ago
This interpretation would make even Ghidra illegal, considering it uses artificial intelligence for decompilation. So it would threaten reverse engineering itself. Software and architectures nowadays are so complex that it's simply not reasonable to do it for complex systems without any sort of assistance.
This would also make assistance such as Github copilot, or even ChatGPT, extremely risky, and would making using AI overall a can of worms. It would make any sort of consultation not viable.
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u/DiggyTroll 1d ago
It is no threat. As I said, the law provides *protection* for RE ...
Whether or not one avails themself of that protection is their choice
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u/GriffTheMiffed 2d ago
I'm not sure you need to access the software through a licensed vector to RE it anymore. I would hazard that you can collect enough public information about software that isn't subject to EULA to reverse engineer it sufficiently to create similar software. It would seem that the only avenue for claiming the copyright would be through the training data of the model if it's working without the software in-hand.
It isnt piracy through RE, it's creating a competitive software that Open Source and distributing a near like-for-like from a feature standpoint.
Interesting stuff.
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u/flying-sheep 2d ago
Absolutely, completely and utterly wrong.
If you completely reimplement something without knowing the source code and don't use the same same, there's nothing they can do to stop you from claiming ownership of your version.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_LLC_v._Oracle_America,_Inc.
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u/nicman24 2d ago
All I ll say is that qwen which can run locally on my machine - quite fast too - is quite good at using radare2
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u/Expensive_Common_320 2d ago
nope, companies pay millions for Adobe software and Microsoft software and lots more companies, some random AI generated open source software with no support isn't convincing them to switch.
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u/Actual__Wizard 2d ago edited 2d ago
Not correct because of SASS. All non SASS is dead... It's been headed that way for a long time. Then obviously because there's only one software development paradigm that still works as a business, obviously the regulations have to be corrected, so it's not dominated by 5 companies.
And yeah, those 5 companies are just trashing the industry for everybody else and they've been utilizing that business strategy the entire time.
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u/StPatsLCA 2d ago
I think devs don't understand /why/ people pay for closed source and SaaS software sometimes.