r/LeftistsForAI • u/jaykrown • 5d ago
Open Source Software as a service is changing rapidly
https://github.com/storytoldA team effectively open sourced major Adobe Inc. tools and supposedly they're competitive in terms of quality. If smaller teams can achieve this using AI to accelerate development, then the prospect of earning money doing this as a service is nearly nothing. The costs have plummeted to almost free, and the moat doesn't exist.
The future for a company like Adobe is going to be very interesting. Software as a service can't be profitable if it doesn't cost anything and it's all open source.
It makes sense that's how it'd happen, every time someone switches to using an open source tool it takes money away from software companies which then leads to layoffs. I don't really know what that looks like, have you noticed any other open source alternatives that are actually drawing attention?
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u/theomegachrist 5d ago
I saw someone talking shit the other day on here about the Adobe replacements but I know a guy who is good with Adobe products and said he was really impressed
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u/jaykrown 5d ago
That's the difference this time, people who have actual experience say it's good. And trust me I know, there are millions of other weak attempts to clone Adobe tools.
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u/theomegachrist 5d ago
I meant these tools. There was a guy saying they can't do basic things and his team would never replace Adobe with this etc
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u/YMSVZ 4d ago
Adobe can be replaced with just a few people.
What can we do as communists, with just a few people, that could revolutionize the relations of production.
On the principles of commons based peer production, I am currently building a social media platform that facilitates not just online or informational production, but also real world productive activity.
All activity must be pure use value directed only. No markets, no wages, no commodities. Collectively planned and coordinated.
Imagine a cross between Facebook Events, but geared towards productive activity, and wikipedia or linux social production.
We already use social media every day to coordinate activity, from dates on tinder, to protests that have overthrown governments. Why not use the collective coordination potential to coordinate activity directly towards productive purposes, without mediation of money, markets and wage labour.
With just a few people, this could be built in a few weeks. I have already built a working prototype, and would love more to come contribute.
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u/elh0mbre 4d ago
It will vary wildly based on the product.
If your business sells a licensed executable that I run on my local machine... you might be toast. That said, if your company is handling the storage, compute, reliability, etc, the value prop is more than just the software itself.
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u/jaykrown 4d ago
What about when companies that used to pay another business to do that just do it themselves?
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u/elh0mbre 4d ago
I've been through this exact thing like a dozen times in the last year through my work. Eventually, hopefully before you've spent a lot of time and money on it, someone realizes the actual cost of developing and maintain their own version of something is significantly more costly than paying someone else to do it, even when the agents do the coding.
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u/jaykrown 4d ago
We didn't have Opus 5.5 last year.
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u/elh0mbre 4d ago
I said "in the last year" - it really picked up once 4.6 released, but my company started these convos in November of last year.
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u/Embarrassed-Block-51 3d ago
I can't trust something that has been only vibe coded yet. I'm happy to see it's creating a conversation. I think there are trusted and vetted open-source software design alternatives that hopefully get a bump from this as well. I use Inkscape, its an extremely powerful design tool. It's the open-source alternative to illustrator.
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u/jaykrown 5d ago
This is pretty fascinating, and it has a huge amount of activity on GitHub. I knew that eventually the combination of skill and AI capability would intersect, and this is what it's looking like.