The Pincer Attack – How AI Killed Open Source | Hacker News Reader

The Pincer Attack – How AI Killed Open Source

linuxtoaster.com

3 pointsdirk940187 comments

Author here. I run LinuxToaster, a set of commercial Unix tools for the AI era. This started as notes after watching the LiteLLM compromise unfold in real time — 94 million monthly downloads, credential stealer active for three hours, maintainer's GitHub issue closed as "not planned." Same week Cloudflare showed one engineer could clone Next.js in a week for $1,100 in inference costs. The thesis: the economics that created open source have inverted. Production used to be expensive and trust was free. Now production is nearly free and trust is the expensive part. Open source is getting hit from every direction — supply chain attacks are cheaper to execute than to detect, corporations clone instead of contribute, and individual devs yoink the three functions they need instead of installing the package. Happy to discuss. I know this is a spicy take for HN.

You're over-doing the self promotion. Perhaps you could read the guidelines, specifically:

> Please don't use HN primarily for promotion. It's ok to post your own stuff part of the time, but the primary use of the site should be for curiosity.

And share something you're curious about.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Fair point. The article doesn't mention LinuxToaster's products — the curiosity here is about the future of open source, not promotion. For what it's worth, toastd does what LiteLLM does in C with no Python supply chain, which is part of what got me thinking about this topic in the first place. But that's not in the post.

Does this part -at the bottom of your article- not count?

> LinuxToaster is a set of Unix tools re-imagined for the AI era. From toast — sed with a brain — to ito, version control built for AI, to squawk, a messaging bus for AI and humans.

After reading the guidelines...

This IS the original source. I wrote it. The guidelines explicitly ask for this.

A post about supply chain attacks, the economics of open source, and the LiteLLM compromise that happened today is squarely on-topic for this audience.

Is "You're over-doing the self promotion" without engaging a single idea in the article a shallow dismissal?

We can see that your submission history is nothing but your own site (https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=dirk94018) and various comments in your posting history history seem to be attempts to drive traffic to it so the other poster is correct in that you are are not adhering to the guidelines. If you have questions, you are welcome to email the site administrators using their email address on the contact page linked at the bottom of the page.

Fair. The posts have all been from our blog, because that's where I write. I'll make a point of submitting other things I find interesting too. In the meantime, happy to discuss the actual ideas in the article if anyone's curious. If you look at the posts, each one is something very different. AI bots creating a shared reality. Open source having a serious supply chain problem today. Gradient descent applied to code. Writing an inference engine from scratch. Each one stands on its own.

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