Comment by lrvick | Hacker News Reader

Comment by lrvick | Hacker News Reader

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I have been using and writing exclusively open source software for going on a decade now. I left multiple employers because I refused to use or write proprietary code for them for any amount of money. Anyone that wants my skillsets needs to accept the results will be open. A lot fewer people are making fun of me for it these days.

I was shocked YC accepted my fully FOSS company, but YC and a lot of investors realize proprietary software is no longer a moat, and some VCs -exclusively- fund FOSS companies now seeing them as the future.

I cannot express the amount of joy and hope it gives me in this dark world that every proprietary binary anyone has ever found useful or entertaining is about to be reverse engineered and have all the tracking bullshit users do not want removed. Only useful or entertaining features will remain.

This is about to completely break a proprietary and surveillance obsessed software industry that deserves to be broken.

I am thankful to have a front row seat in Silicon Valley, and look forward to watching every single company be forced to Open Source or die.

I like the optimism. It reminds me of what we said about the Internet and the World Wide Web.

What do you think the monetization model will be? Honest question. Some of the earlier examples of getting paid for FOSS involved selling customization services and support. But AI can now do the customization and a good deal of the support too.

I think a convenience tax model is all that is left.

Everything we do at Caution is FOSS right down to our website and frontend.

People pay us because we maintain an obsessively strict security model of code review, code signing, full source bootstrapping, and trusting no single human or machine. For any of our customers to hold those standards they would need to hire a minimum of 3 experienced systems/security engineers, and paying a subscription to us is a way cheaper option.

If you want people to pay you, even for open source, you need to provide support and value no AI can match.

What tells you that that AI clone of photoshop isn’t secretly filled with spyware? You could check the source, of course, but who will?

Even a casual technical person can now ask their own LLM agent to review the source for any spyware and it will find it in most cases if present.

That is a level of extreme agency over software that was once only available to security engineers with decades of experience like me, that is now available to almost everyone.

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