Open Source is dead. Long live Open Source.
LLMs changed one thing about the economics of software: generating code became nearly free. Verifying it didn’t. Reviewing a patch, checking that a fix is correct in its context, deciding whether a bug report is real: all of that costs what it always did.
That asymmetry is the whole model. Generation cost collapsed; verification cost didn’t. Three consequences follow:
- The moat around code was never the license. It was the cost of reimplementation, a generation cost, and it’s gone.
- Owning the codebase and adapting it to your exact needs becomes such a big advantage that most software goes internal. What stays shared is what’s too expensive to verify alone.
- Shared projects stop accepting outside code, because reviewing it costs more than generating your own.
None of this means copyright or open source “dies” in some dramatic legal sense. The economics shift first; the law catches up, slowly.