Item — HN Reader

The author highlights exactly what is wrong with doing "Open source" or "Build in public" in 2026.

It now doesn't make any sense to someone to go full time open source (and running on donations) and it is completely thankless of your time anyway. AI has now made it far worse for them.

But the most evergreen part of this is, developers will almost certainly never pay for their own tools and will always build their own and then expect to sell it to themselves, which doesn't work.

So we will more close-sourcing which the author has the right to do.

2 comments

This has nothing to do with open source but to using an opened forge with no restrictions.

As other have said you can always put your app and source code in a web page or read only repo and call it a day. Some people have been doing just that for decades. You don't even have to publish an email address or a real name.

open source will never die as long as there are crazy idealists (like me) who put their time into building things for free, and hope that they will make some random persons life a little bit better. not everyone is a silicon valley "hacker" looking for a bag or a line on their resume.

No one said it will "die".

> as long as there are crazy idealists (like me) who put their time into building things for free, and hope that they will make some random persons life a little bit better.

You are only saying this from the perspective of having an employer paying you for everything.

My point is about developers who don't have that and are doing full time "open source" for free which that is not sustainable in the long term. AI will only just make it less worth it for them to maintain open source software as such, unless companies or a substantial amount of other users / developers pay for support.

I have never seen lawyers, mechanics, surgeons and financial advisors ever reduce their profession to free work or advice.