AI and its Effects on Open Source Software.

The future of software has always been relatively open. Often attached to large leaps in development, open-source software has leaped forward as well. Think of closed source DAWs (Digital audio workstations) and the creation of Audacity. Blender came out only 1 month before Maya if you can believe that.

This trend has held for a few decades now, and I think we are in the middle of what I am gonna call a Universal Collapse. We have hit a sort of turning point, where the volume of open source software is being outpaced by people looking to profit off of it.

Look back at the movie industry, which tends to move a bit faster in expansion and collapse. Movies started coming out every week almost the entire year. With that, the price of movies was going up, and the cost of a theatre experience exploded.

Netflix was released, and the collapse ensued. Piracy was happening less often as people had one cheap place to watch movies and TV. Everyone jumped on board. Movies started going directly to Netflix. Then, Netflix raised its prices and limited accounts to fewer users.

A few years of this sparked the expansion by way of a ton of different paid streaming services. How long do you think this will go on before another collapse? I am getting to a point here, I promise.

The collapse of Open Source Software at the hands of Microsoft.

Microsoft has been a (relatively inactive) part of the Open-source community for a few years now, since the release of Windows Installer XML in 2004. Their activity increased after they bought Github in 2018. Three years later, an unexpected announcement was made; Copilot was released in closed beta in June of 2021.

Copilot is a tool that promises(and delivers) the ability to select and insert open source code into your software in an intelligent way, reducing the time it takes to produce new functionality. I have had the chance to use it extensively to make a few applications since it was released, and it really does what was promised with few issues. It’s not always perfect, but it is seldom intrusive when it is wrong.

The potential issue here is that it seems to ignore copyright preferences from originally open-source software. For instance, if you write a library like Curl that is open source, and you set the copyright to something like GPL, which requires any modification of the source code to also be released open-source, Copilot will ignore this and insert it, regardless of the context or license preference in the new project. It doesn’t even leave a comment mentioning the code it was derived from. Not to mention the issue where it has occasionally taken secret keys erroneously merged into open-source software and used them in the new software.

Suddenly, software that HAD to be open source by license is closed to the world.

Without context, or licenses being carried forward, nothing is stopping a developer from releasing what should have been Open Source as a closed source paid software. With no need to fork entire libraries with their licenses, I am guessing there will be a sudden spike of closed source code.

The most compelling argument for my point here is that Copilot has already confirmed that it will be a paid service, profiting off of Open Source code in a way that is almost impossible to track.

The potential for a greater wealth gap

A small point that I would like to make here… If there is a tool that increases programmer productivity 10x, but the cost is so prohibitive that only silicon valley engineers can afford it, there is a great potential for a new glass ceiling for anyone that doesn’t fit this very specific cohort.

During the pandemic, we have seen explosive growth in the tech sector for countries in South America among many others. This expansion is great for the programming community, for various reasons. Imagine if you put that possibility behind a paywall. If a programmer had to pay a monthly fee in USD to have a chance at an entry-level job.

This isn’t just happening with software

Look at the transition from Blogspot and Ghost.io to Medium. This post is going to Medium because there is no other choice. The collapse has happened where the greatest access to viewers is through a paid subscription.

How long until Stack Overflow puts a paywall on shared intelligence, like the white paper industry?

This all may sound like a tinfoil prologue, but I hope you’re as curious about this rollercoaster as I am.

How does this affect you and your team?

It’s not as dystopian as it seems for now. You might see an increase in coder productivity or content production with the onset of AI tools. We all have a part to play in making sure coding resources are available to as many people as possible. And this just might give us more time to focus on creativity or the things we care about, instead of the doldrum. We are just going to have to wait and see.

In the meantime, make sure you are doing what you can to contribute to OSS as an individual or as a team.

StartupLandia will continue to contribute to the OSS Ruby community by helping to grow and create OS Ruby Gems, and I hope you all will too!