Posted by amarsahinovic 1/10/2026
Uh, yeah you can. There’s a whole DevOps ecosystem of software and cloud services (accessible via infrastructure—as-code) that your agents can use to do this. I don’t think businesses who specialize in ops are safe from downsizing.
I also think he's glossing over the fact that one of the reasons why companies choose to pay for "ops" to run their software for them is because it's built by amateurs or amateurs-playing-professional and runs like shit. I happen to know this first hand from years of working at a company selling hosting and ops for the exact same CMS that Dries' business hosts (Drupal, a PHP-based CMS) and the absolute garbage that some people are able to put together in frameworks like Wordpress and Drupal is truly astounding. I'm not even talking about the janky local businesses where their nephew who was handy with computers made them a Wordpress site - big multinational companies have sites in these frameworks that can barely handle 1x their normal traffic and more or less explode at 1.5x.
The business of hosting these customers' poorly optimized garbage remains a big business. But we're entering into an era where the people who produce poorly optimized software have a different path to take rather than throwing it to a SaaS platform that can through sheer force of will make their lead-weight airplane fly. They can spend orders of magnitude less money to pay an LLM to make the software actually just not run like shit in the first place. Throwing scaling at the problem of 99.95% is a blunt instrument that only works if the person paying doesn't have the time, money, or knowledge to do it themselves.
Companies like these (including the one I work for currently) are absolutely going to get squeezed from both directions. The ceiling is coming down as more realize they can do their own devops, and the floor is rising as customer code quality gets better. Eventually you have to try your best to be 3 ft tall instead of 6.
Hence (as TFA points out) open source code from commercial entities was just a marketing channel and source of free labor... err, community contributions... to auxiliary offerings that actually made money. This basic economic drive is totally natural but creates dynamics that lead to suboptimal behaviors and controversy multiple times.
For instance, a favorite business model is charging for support. Another one was charging for a convenient packaging or hosting of an “open core” project. In either case, the incentives just didn’t align towards making the software bug-free and easily usable, because that would actively hamper monetization. This led to instances of pathological behavior, like Red Hat futzing with its patches or pay-walling its source code to hamper other Linux vendors.
Then there were cases where the "open source" branding was used to get market-share, but licenses restricted usage in lucrative applications, like Sun with Java. But worse, often a bigger fish swooped in to take the code, as they were legally allowed to, and repackage it in their own products undercutting the original owners. E.g. Google worked around Sun's licensing restrictions to use Java completely for free in Android. And then ironically Android itself was marketed as "open source" while its licensing came with its own extremely onerous restrictions to prevent true competition.
Or all those cases when hyperscalers undercut the original owners’ offerings by providing open source projects as proprietary Software as a Service.
All this in turn led to all sorts of controversies like lawsuits or companies rug-pulling its community with a license change.
And aside from all that, the same pressures regularly led to the “enshittification” of software.
Open Source is largely a socialist (or even communist) movement, but businesses exist in a fundamentally capitalistic society. The tensions between those philosophies were inevitable. Socialists gonna socialize, but capitalists gonna capitalize.
With AI, current OSS business models may soon be dead. And personally I would think, to the extent they were based on misaligned incentives or unhealthy dynamics, good riddance!
Open Source itself will not go away, but it will enter a new era. The cost of code has dropped so much, monetizing will be hard. But by the same token, it will encourage people, having invested so much fewer resources creating it, to release their code for free. A lot of it will be slop, but the quantity will be overwhelming.
It’s not clear how this era will pan out, but interesting times ahead.
yes, this is indirectly hinting that during training the GPL tainted code touches every single floating point value in a model making it derivative work - even the tokenizer isn't immune to this.
A tokenizer's set of tokens isn't copyrightable in the first place, so it can't really be a derivative work of anything.
the only reason usermode is not affected is because they have an exclusion for it and only via defined communication protocol, if you go around it or attempt to put a workaround in the kernel guess what: it still violates the license - point is: it is very restrictive.
This is not how copyright law works. The GPL is a copyright license, as stated by the FSF. Something which is not subject to copyright cannot be subject to a copyright license.
The tokenizer's tokens aren't patented, for sure. They can't be trademarked (they don't identify a product or service). They aren't a trade secret (the data is public). They aren't copyrighted (not a creative work). And the GPL explicitly preserves fair use rights, so there are no contractual restrictions either.
A tokenizer is effectively a list of the top-n most common byte sequences. There's simply no basis in law for it to be subject to copyright or any other IP law in the average situation.
this is correct. If you open source your software, then why are you mad when companies like AWS, OpenAI, etc. make tons of money?
Open Source software is always a bridge that leads to something else to commercialize on. If you want to sell software, then pick Microsoft's model and sell your software as closed source. If you get mad and cry about making money to sustain your open source project, then pick the right license for your business.
That's one of the issues with AI, though; strongly copylefted software suddenly finds itself unable to enforce its license because "AI" gets a free pass on copyright for some reason.
Dual-licensing open source with business-unfriendly licensing used to be a pretty good way to sell software, but thanks to the absurd legal position AI models have managed to squeeze themselves into, that stopped in an instant.
And, in many cases, you had to produce that value yourself. GPL licensing lawsuits ensured this.
AI extracting value from software in such a way that the creators no longer can take the small scraps they were willing to live on seems likely to change this dynamic.
I expect no-source-available software (including shareware) to proliferate again, to the detriment of open source.