Open-source alternatives are being launched at an ungodly pace and they are really polished. All these comments about AI Slop are underestimating how good these builders have gotten and AI lets you iterate really fast. If the builder actually uses the software he's building, the feedback loop is really efficient.

I keep a directory of open-source alternatives and just in the past month, I've replaced applications I've used for years with open-source alternatives.

The zero-cost fallacy: open-source software in the agentic era.

Here's my thoughts on this. It's back to open source, not open maintainer or open usage. I am producing lots of new code, i am publishing it. I am NOT interested in starting a project or having other people contribute. It's a cambrian explosion, the cost of adding features is basically zero. I'm going with "patching software is more common and we need tools around patching" rather than using other peoples stuff, just take what you want and fix it.

One stupid one is XRDP required some hack to go through VNC to connect to an existing session. I now have it built into xrdp and lets you pick the X11 session you on dial up and you're good to go. Why is this not a feature I dont know, but xrdp does it all now without vnc or anything. good stuff. i published it sure, i dont care if anyone uses it though.

Shift from passive consumption to active ownership.

Implement rigid supply chain auditing.

Formalize an open source contribution and patronage budget.

Well none of these help my bottom line directly so my boss will not approve.

the issue with articles that try to analyze the state of open source and its sustainability and all that is that nothing about open source makes any sense if you just talk about it. Imagine you're transported to 1977 and you work at IBM and you try to tell them, oh hey I have an idea, how about the OS everyone uses for literally all commerce, communication, military, etc., you name it, will be written by one guy in his spare time and later maintained by tens of thousands of mostly unpaid volunteers. "Don't other companies try to copy it and sell it as their own?" "Well sure, but mostly it's better to use the free one everyone knows". Try selling your manager at IBM in 1977 that idea for new software. It would be impossible. It would be impossible today.

Trying to explain how the global economy and welfare of most of humanity is hugely dependent on free software production labor, without the advent of actually seeing a world where this actually happens, is just like when we try to explain something like consciousness. There is no explanation that makes sense. So predictions about new avenues of doom (like "MIT licensing was a huge mistake! we should have all been GPL!") similarly dont carry a lot of weight, because of course these predictions make perfect sense in the abstract, yet real world results don't line up at all.

Basically open source software is an emergent phenomenon, like consciousness or evolution, or perhaps even how very large language models suddenly seemed like real people. It's something that would never be predictable in its own absence, which means it will remain largely unpredictable how it will respond to ongoing changes such as "the open source authors and contributors now use programs themselves to produce more code".

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I stopped reading at "load-bearing" and em dash.