It could slow down progress.
Who beside the open source community develops new features if they can be easily copied?
Who beside the open source community develops new features if they can be easily copied?
That may well be the future for most commercial software (and software engineers) as margins collapse and AI tokenomics moves more power from labor to capital.
But why invest time and money when your features get copied as soon as you publish it?
Because you still get money?
Nothing about getting copied means you don't still get money. It probably just means your legal team has some people to annoy into going away if you're a big company.
The only thing that made commercial software more innovative is most developers never had time to build and maintain a big open source project without support from their job. Now we have agents and it takes a lot less time to implement your ideas. That means slop filling up GitHub, but also that people who came up with good new features can make them real in their free time.
ReSkate is a good example, it's a project 90% coded by AI but the people working on it are passionate and most of them are experienced game modders. They know what made the old Skate games special and wanted to bring it back to the new one. Now it's better than vanilla Skate 4 and has tons of new features never seen in the OG trilogy. That project would never be possible without Claude taking care of the hard and boring RE work.
But I guess they will also think twice if big companies can rip off the software with clean room AI implementation to circumvent the open source licenses
IMHO it's the best outcome.
Not perfect, of course. All that hype about the vibe-cloned Adobe suite is, today, hype. Next year it might not be, though that depends on questions like "will investment bubble pop?" etc.
But we are at a level where, if you can describe a feature or process well enough to test it, an LLM can develop and optimise for that feature/process. That creates opportunities for businesses to have custom just-for-them business software, which nobody copies because nobody outside the business even bothers to learn exist.