This is kind of wishful thinking. I'm not saying you're wrong, but there's no real way to prove you're right. Sometimes open source wins, but not every time. The whole machine learning field is still too young to have a clear answer.
(author here): I am currently writing a book about programming with LLMs, I have absolutely put my money where my mouth is over the last year, and there is not doubt in my mind that we will see incredible tools in 2024.
Already the emergent tools and frameworks are impressive, and the fact that you can make them yours by adding a couple of prompting lines and really tailor them to your codebase is the killer factor.
My tooling ( https://github.com/go-go-golems/geppetto ) sucks ass UI wise, yet I get an incredible value out of it. It's hard to quantify as a 10X, because my code architecture has changed to accomodate the models.
In some ways, the trick to coding with LLMs is to... not have them produce code, but intermediate DSL representations. There's much more to it, thus the book.
In the past I wanted to believe this can be the future, where open source will somehow win (at least in some parts). What I see is that even the biggest projects are mere tools in the hands of the big corporations. Linux, Postgres, etc. All great! But have been assimilated. I cannot really consider them a win.
It seems to me that it goes back and forth - it also seems to me that the advancements in LLMs will go a similar route.
It dominates everywhere from fairly small embedded, to super computers, with the one notable exception of the desktop, a shrinking market and mostly a historical anomaly (Microsoft cornered it before Linux was a viable player in that space).
I wouldn't say it is a "mere tool in the hands of big corporations". Sure these days most Linux developers are paid by corporations (a good thingg since that allows them to work full time on Linux) but the important point is that those corporations don't control Linux. Sure they can pay people to work on specific areas but they don't get to decide what gets merged or what the acceptance criteria are.
More generally, beyond Linux, huge swathes of new technology are expected to be open source or no one looks at them (think language and frameworks).
In the late 90s / early 2000s it became obvious that software development would no longer be about writing things from scratch but building on existing components. But there were two competing models for this. There was Microsoft's vision which envisionned a market of binary components that people would buy and use to compose application (that gave rise to the likes of Active X, DCOM, OLE) and the Open Source community vision that saw us building on components supplied in source form. It's clear that today the second vision has won. Even proprietary software now uses huge quantites of open source internally (take a look at the "about" screen on your Smartphone, TV or router).
LLMs may be the exception here for the moment (mainly due to the compute power needed for training).
Open source has won hands down for developers. It’s basically a giant tool bin and parts yard for people who build things with software. It’s also useful to extremely tech savvy people who like to DIY homelab type stuff.
In the consumer realm it has lost equally decisively.
The reason, I think, is that the distance between software nerds can use and software the general public can (or wants) to use is significantly larger than anyone understood. Getting something to work gets it like 5% of the way to making it usable.
Even worse, making it usable requires a huge amount of the kind of nit picky UI/UX work that programmers hate to do. This means they have to be paid to do it, which means usable software is many many times more expensive than technical software.
The situation is hopeless unless people start paying for open software, which is hard because the FOSS movement taught everyone that software should be free.
>Linux, Postgres, etc. All great! But have been assimilated.
If you're a company, you almost certainly want support, certifications, and related benefits of having a commercial product. And it's nice to have that avenue to fund developers. But the side effect is that the software is still free as in beer open source that anyone can download. In general, I'd say open source infrastructure software has won pretty thoroughly (even if not universally).
larve|2 years ago
Already the emergent tools and frameworks are impressive, and the fact that you can make them yours by adding a couple of prompting lines and really tailor them to your codebase is the killer factor.
My tooling ( https://github.com/go-go-golems/geppetto ) sucks ass UI wise, yet I get an incredible value out of it. It's hard to quantify as a 10X, because my code architecture has changed to accomodate the models.
In some ways, the trick to coding with LLMs is to... not have them produce code, but intermediate DSL representations. There's much more to it, thus the book.
drdg|2 years ago
In the past I wanted to believe this can be the future, where open source will somehow win (at least in some parts). What I see is that even the biggest projects are mere tools in the hands of the big corporations. Linux, Postgres, etc. All great! But have been assimilated. I cannot really consider them a win.
It seems to me that it goes back and forth - it also seems to me that the advancements in LLMs will go a similar route.
mfuzzey|2 years ago
It dominates everywhere from fairly small embedded, to super computers, with the one notable exception of the desktop, a shrinking market and mostly a historical anomaly (Microsoft cornered it before Linux was a viable player in that space).
I wouldn't say it is a "mere tool in the hands of big corporations". Sure these days most Linux developers are paid by corporations (a good thingg since that allows them to work full time on Linux) but the important point is that those corporations don't control Linux. Sure they can pay people to work on specific areas but they don't get to decide what gets merged or what the acceptance criteria are.
More generally, beyond Linux, huge swathes of new technology are expected to be open source or no one looks at them (think language and frameworks).
In the late 90s / early 2000s it became obvious that software development would no longer be about writing things from scratch but building on existing components. But there were two competing models for this. There was Microsoft's vision which envisionned a market of binary components that people would buy and use to compose application (that gave rise to the likes of Active X, DCOM, OLE) and the Open Source community vision that saw us building on components supplied in source form. It's clear that today the second vision has won. Even proprietary software now uses huge quantites of open source internally (take a look at the "about" screen on your Smartphone, TV or router).
LLMs may be the exception here for the moment (mainly due to the compute power needed for training).
api|2 years ago
In the consumer realm it has lost equally decisively.
The reason, I think, is that the distance between software nerds can use and software the general public can (or wants) to use is significantly larger than anyone understood. Getting something to work gets it like 5% of the way to making it usable.
Even worse, making it usable requires a huge amount of the kind of nit picky UI/UX work that programmers hate to do. This means they have to be paid to do it, which means usable software is many many times more expensive than technical software.
The situation is hopeless unless people start paying for open software, which is hard because the FOSS movement taught everyone that software should be free.
ghaff|2 years ago
If you're a company, you almost certainly want support, certifications, and related benefits of having a commercial product. And it's nice to have that avenue to fund developers. But the side effect is that the software is still free as in beer open source that anyone can download. In general, I'd say open source infrastructure software has won pretty thoroughly (even if not universally).
toenail|2 years ago
Are you trying to argue that free software becomes less free because specific groups of people contribute to it?
jrm4|2 years ago
We just didn't fully realize what that would look like before it happened.
flohofwoe|2 years ago