I regret to inform you that vibes don’t pay the bills. Specifically, open source vibes. For as long as I’ve followed open source, there has been a tendency for the industry to focus on normative values of open source, i.e., why people should embrace open source, as if it were a morally superior way to build software. But software, whether open source or proprietary, is just a tool to get things done. Whether open source is “good” and closed source is “bad” depends entirely on whether it helps developers and customers more effectively get stuff done.
As Redis CEO Rowan Trollope put it to me recently, for the average developer it’s not a question of open or closed licensing but rather, “Does this thing offer something unique and differentiated … that I need in my application?”
With that in mind, it’s worth paying attention to where the money is moving in AI, the hottest market in tech. The poster child for open source AI is Hugging Face, which generates a nice profit by positioning itself as ground zero for open source AI models. Indeed, the company goes further, touting open source as the only way to do AI correctly. Fine, except for this inconvenient truth on its site: “Llama is one of the first open source LLMs to have outperformed/matched closed source ones.” Many would say Llama isn’t open source at all but … details! Yet the real money in AI is going to the hyperscale clouds that are less idealistic about open source and a lot more focused on customer convenience.
