alt Hacker News> The reasoning provided by their CEO, Bailey Pumfleet, is that AI has automated vulnerability discovery at scale,
That sounds like an excuse. The real reason is probably that it's hard to make a viable business out of developing open source.
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Exactly. I respect their decision to go closed source if that's what they need to do to make it a viable business, but just be honest about it. Don't make up some excuse around security and open source.
AI makes a great scapegoat. Need to lay off people? "AI." Need to switch to closed source? "AI."
We've run an extremely profitable business for five years, raised a seed and a Series A, and grown at 300% a year sustainably while being open source.
Going closed source actually hurts our business more than it benefits it. But it ultimately protects customer data, and that's what we care about the most.
separating codebase and leaving 'cal.diy' for hobbyists is pretty much the classic open-core path. the community phase is over and they need to protect their enterprise revenue.
blaming AI scanners is just really convenient PR cover for a normal license change.
It’s also now ridiculously easy to simply cherry pick from open source without actually “using” it.
“I need to do foo in my app. Libraries bar and baz do these bits well. Pick the best from each and let’s implement them here”
I’d not be surprised if npmjs.com and its ilk turn into more a reference site than a package manager backend soon.
I'd think it's also much easier to spin up a (in some area) slightly better clone and eat into their revenue.
Yes, it feels like they've been looking for an excuse to go closed-source, and this one is plausible enough to make it sound like they're only doing it because they "have to".
I mean, it's hard to make a viable business regardless of if the tech is OSS or not, but it's often seen as more challenging this way.
Yes. Before AI the source was a demonstration of your substance. Users would be encouraged to reach out to maintainers to pay for upgrades or custom tweaks or training. Or indirectly pay for advertising while reading docs. After AI those revenue streams have collapsed. Now you have to withdraw enough of the work to make it hard for an individual to recreate with an LLM. The open source needs to be restricted to a rich interaction layer. Cloudflare just announced they are using that model with their services which were already closed source but now they are exposing them through new APIs. So they can capitalize on existing services that were not ripe enough for SaaS before AI, that had to be handled by their in-house professionals services folks. With this move they are using AI to expand/automate their white glove professional services business to smaller customers.