(cross posting from LinkedIn: https://lnkd.in/p/d2PM-CAi )

Dries Buytaert published recently (link below) about what 25+ years of running an open source project and a commercial company at the same time tells us about the world “after code scarcity.”

“As AI makes applications cheaper to recreate, the traditional SaaS bundle of software and operations comes under pressure. Customers may become less willing to pay for access to application functionality without becoming any less willing to pay to run and manage applications in production. For Open Source businesses those economics are not new.”
– https://lnkd.in/gVQ69qe3

Of course (as Dries notes) open source / free software was also free in a different way (the old “free as in freedom” vs “free as in beer”). It was never *just* that you could get code without paying money for it, though that was a key part. It was always also that you could use it for any purpose, did not need permission from the code owner to use it for what you wanted to use it for, and owned the outcome.

I think the current token and API driven approach is creating a new set of dependencies, leading to folks “renting” their software rather than “owning it.” (See Mozilla’s Raffi Krikorian and his “Owners Not Renters” podcast/newsletter for more on this). (Feels ironic to me the newsletter is built on substack, though apparently you can exit with your content and subscriber list if you choose).

Manus AI, the company acquired by Meta and then unacquired after the Chinese government intervened, is going through a kind of conscious uncoupling, requiring users to back up data so that it can later be restored onto server infrastructure outside Meta.

In the process, a friend who has built multiple businesses on top of Manus had a bit of panic. What if Manus suddenly became unavailable? What if they could no longer be accessed from outside the great firewall of China? What if the “restore” process doesn’t work?

She’d have the code—or at least it would be in github repos to which she had access, which is close enough to the same thing—but no idea how to set up, host, deploy, operate and maintain the core business infrastructure without Manus’ help. She could hand the codebase to another AI platform and ask it to build the operational aspects necessary, but that’s just moving from one landlord to another, not creating ownership.

It reminds me of bands and other creative individuals who don’t own a domain, but build their presence on Facebook pages, or Instagram accounts, or TikTok usernames. What happens if that platform goes away or changes policies in a way that makes your usage no longer acceptable?

How are you isolating yourself from the dependencies (literal and technical but also softer / lack of knowledge based) of the AI platforms on which you’re building things?

#opensource#ai#dependencies#ownership