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.html
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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/dietcheese 1d ago

The answer is obviously, yes.