Will AI Kill Open Source Communities

I'm worried that AI is going to kill open source communities. Imagine contributing your knowledge, AI takes it, and you are no longer needed.

What is Open Source?

Tech experts create source components which others may use to build their projects faster - often at no cost.

Open source is a type of license, where you could take my work, with certain restrictions (if any) and use that work to help your initiatives go faster. Think lego blocks, like a database, business processes, user interface, and web server, all snapping together seamlesly. Within days, you could achieve what might otherwise have taken you years.

Rather than you writing all the code, just use some of mine.

Some open source projects have little to no constraints. You can take the code for free, and do what you want with it, use it however you wish, even use it in your business.

Some open source projects limit use to research contexts, or personal use, and explicitly prohibit commericial use.

The Circle of Life

Regardless of license constraints, what most commonly happens is that code gets published, people find it useful, and then start to feed their own ideas back in, which makes the code more useful, even more valuable.

It's a feedback loop. The community gives you something. You give it back, in a better state than when you found it. That loop is almost infinite.

You are using so many different open source projects right now. The internet would barely exist without open source initiatives.

Open source is one of the best technical anologies for the circle of life.

AI will kill Open Source

I'm 99% sure that if AI takes all of our coding expertise, and that is then used to provide subscription based services that you pay for each month, the logical conclusion is, that open source projects will have nothing fed back to them. They will attrophy and die.

The irony, the crime if you will, is that AI was trained on a large body of open source code. It's how ChatGPT learned to generate code. It's why there is a class-action lawsuit in the USA, as open source projects are being illegally used for commercial gain.

But lawsuits aside, I don't know if anybody has identified this unintended impact on open source projects. If you don't improve them, because you don't even know they exist due to using AI generated code, those projects just stagnate.

Wrapping-up

A few highly respected software developers have messaged me in recent weeks, asking if I buy into the hype that AI will take our jobs, as coders.

AI will write code, we've seen it happen in thousands of YouTube videos. So do you need us anymore?

Well, being frank, the code that AI generates is usually 0.0001% of what you really need for a new App, or new business system. Many would say that AI generated code generally sucks too!

So coders are safe for a while yet, I reckon.

But I think it's proven, that the companies building AI are unethical, and just on a grab for cash, and have no respect and give insufficient recognition (remuneration) for the enormous body of knowledge on which their success has been built.

What do you think as a coder? What do you think as someone that employs or contracts coders? Would you use AI and not hire coders, if you could?

What do Microsoft, AWS and Google think about this?