logoalt Hacker News

floathubyesterday at 10:30 PM4 repliesview on HN

Free software has never mattered more.

All the infrastructure that runs the whole AI-over-the-internet juggernaut is essentially all open source.

Heck, even Claude Code would be far less useful without grep, diff, git, head, etc., etc., etc. And one can easily see a day where something like a local sort Claude Code talking to Open Weight and Open Source models is the core dev tool.


Replies

CobrastanJorjiyesterday at 10:58 PM

It's not just that open source code is useful in an age of AI, it's that the AI could only have been made because of the open source code.

show 1 reply
PaulDavisThe1sttoday at 1:37 AM

> Free software has never mattered more.

But the Libre part of Free Software has never mattered less, at least so TFA argues and while I could niggle with the point, it's not wrong.

andoandoyesterday at 11:24 PM

Why isnt LLM training itself open sourced? With all the compute in the world, something like Folding@home here would be killer

show 1 reply
TacticalCoderyesterday at 10:48 PM

> All the infrastructure that runs the whole AI-over-the-internet juggernaut is essentially all open source.

Exactly.

> Heck, even Claude Code would be far less useful without grep, diff, git, head, etc.

It wouldn't even work. It's constantly using those.

I remember reading a Claude Code CLI install doc and the first thing was "we need ripgrep" with zero shame.

All these tools also all basically run on top of Linux: with Claude Code actually installing, on Windows and MacOS, a full linux VM on the system.

It's all open-source command line tools, an open-source OS and piping program one to the other. I'm on Linux on the desktop (and servers ofc) since the Slackware days... And I was right all along.

show 1 reply