Depends on how it's measured as that may be the norm for the more recognizable large projects, but the small projects are much more numerous and they often have a Ko-fi, OpenCollective, other donation link, or ads on the docs.

I suspect a large majority of the money spent towards open source is in the form of support contracts, yes, but large contracts paid by large companies to large projects. The problem is that a majority of the *projects* are small, often single person, and *those* do not have a good way of funding their work. There is no web of small companies paying small projects keeping the greater open source community healthy, and so smaller projects have to look to other ways to fund work.

Unfortunately without the old guard creating packages like tailwind etc then the new training data may very well be vibe coded. It's not just a lack of funding that will hit OSS. It's them getting blatted by AI bug/vuln reports. If OSS is no longer profitable or fun it's unlikely to survive. I do wonder what happens when the AIs ingest their own output. Does it degrade or stay stagnant.

The reason people made open source projects and devoted time to maintaining them, was purely because it was enjoyable to do so. In the age of AI, that is gone. I no longer want to release my work for the benefit of others, because now it is only feeding this infernal bullshit machine, which will steal my work and sell it as its own. And if that wasn't bad enough, it will send a deluge of slop bugreports and phishing attacks.

AI needs to die. The bubble can't burst soon enough.

Your post denies the status quo. That isn't how any of this works at all.

It's a distillation process. AI absolutely can (and is) being trained on AI-generated, AI-augmented, AI-processed, and AI-sintered data.

I'd suggest you familiarize yourself with where things are today (as opposed to 6 months ago, or 2 years ago). If you haven't reevaluated state of the art in the past 2 months with any depth, you're gravely behind.

Does the Akira License involve biker gangs and racing around on a motorcycle?

If the project is funded through donations, if the donation link is never seen by human eyeballs; the donation link never gets clicked.

The given example of Tailwind monetized by having the base framework be free, but having a collection of tools including a Component Library be licensed. So if an LLM is pumping out examples rather than the docs, the user isn't going to see the value add subscription.

If a project has advertising and you see it, then you are already contributing. But if the LLM is has to be "

To say that open source is being killed by vibe coding is just... crazy. It's simply wrong.

There are numerous vibe coding apps now which were written entirely with vibe coding. An entirely new paradigm of development exists today which didn't exist even a year ago - claude code, opencode (omo/slim), codex, cursor, and on and on. Then you've got the agentic stacks, and everything else that's largely open and free. "Come use this vibe coded thing I built this weekend! It's live in production, you can see it working - and here's the git repo!"

Coding skills are no longer a barrier to iteration and improvement. There are so many cool projects out there now being done by people who have an idea and see a business case and want to fill it.

Aside from the projects, I've already taken 2 libraries myself and forked them to change (and improve) functionality for my specific use cases. I'm assuming they don't want my changes, but they can always pull them back if they want. They can see I've got a fork. My willingness to deal with "well they may not accept my changes" + slowing my own velocity is low. The repo is public, the commit comments are better than anything I've personally done in the past.

"AI and vibe coding breaks that process at the early stages because there is no longer the humans looking at new things and taking a chance on something new and unfinished"

Um... have you even tried vibe coding? You can one-shot a project in 20 minutes. I've done it numerous times - an old project I spent weeks writing specifications for, boom, done. I also now have a very useful data indexer which integrates smb shares with MacOS finder. Any sort of idea can now quickly come to fruition in a couple hours with a good set of prompts. Want to make an antiquated database format convertible to a newer platform, and reimplement the frontend? I once had to take a 15-year old physical SCO system running a proprietary database over to a virtual environment, 10 years back. It was a painful process, because SCO and failing hardware. But today? Once I got to that point I could've reimplemented it anew in a couple days, allowing those companies to expand the software capabilities they paid hundreds of thousands for at the time, to something which suited their current business needs (which were a paper and spreadsheet process).

A mildly capable office tech could take an existing git repo of their project tree and maintain it/add features and maintain the product well enough using vibe coding, instead of languishing for a decade, like they had to previously.

You seem to be missing the fact that LLMs have vastly exceeded prior functionality. Today, the frontier models are easily 2x what they were in October. October was easily 2x what they were in May of last year. May of last year? 2x as capable as they were the year prior. We're approaching exponential improvements, and models have been solving previously-unsolved NP hard problems: that's innovation.

If you have an idea, it can be done with vibe coding today if you have the intelligence and creativity to do it. Simple as. If you don't, you can't - and won't.

I don't know how the next Python is going to get any traction, if table stakes for adoption is "language is understood by LLMs".

The current generation of coders won't use it if their LLM of choice doesn't understand it.

LLMs won't understand it if there's no training data, which comes from users.

I've always told people that coding would be automated last, if ever.

Apparently I was wrong, and will have to settle for being part of the last generation of coders that can actually read and understand code without

The innovation comes from the guy/girl telling the vibe coding platform what to do.

That is a no brainer or not?

The Agents produce code you would otherwise write by hand.

What is the farking difference if the next for loop is spit out by an AI, I use Eclipse auto complete, or write it in vi by hand?

None, nothing, nada. It is the exact same sequence of characters.

If it comes true. I doubt it will. The reason we maintain libraries is because complexity grows nonlinearly with the size of a system. Keeping the systems small with well-defined interfaces manages that problem.

AI isn't magic. A computer might have greater capacity for tracking down complex behaviour than a human does but it isn't infinite. And the current systems, just like humans, do a lot better when they have good libraries to stick together than they do if you ask them for a big bare metal monolith.

Security and bugs come to mind. A new library will have bugs and security holes but if it becomes popular and is well curated then it becomes increasingly stable and secure. If a LLM generates a new equivalent to a library fresh every time it is run then the bug and security risks are fresh every time. I guess we will see how that evolves over time, but right now it is not hard to find news reports of deployed vibe code not really being up to scratch.

All valid points but remember people are expected obey laws, such as copyright, but that does not apply to well funded corporations. They are special and can do whatever the like, the law does not apply to them. You asked about how "Copyright licenses being handled"? They don't 'handle' them, they simply ignore them. This is what has made LLM so powerful, if you have money you can train them on anything, including copyright works, and then simply claim that LLMs are too important to fail so they can not