alt Hacker News> The reasoning provided by their CEO, Bailey Pumfleet, is that AI has automated vulnerability discovery at scale,
That sounds like an excuse. The real reason is probably that it's hard to make a viable business out of developing open source.
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AI makes a great scapegoat. Need to lay off people? "AI." Need to switch to closed source? "AI."
We've run an extremely profitable business for five years, raised a seed and a Series A, and grown at 300% a year sustainably while being open source.
Going closed source actually hurts our business more than it benefits it. But it ultimately protects customer data, and that's what we care about the most.
separating codebase and leaving 'cal.diy' for hobbyists is pretty much the classic open-core path. the community phase is over and they need to protect their enterprise revenue.
blaming AI scanners is just really convenient PR cover for a normal license change.
It’s also now ridiculously easy to simply cherry pick from open source without actually “using” it.
“I need to do foo in my app. Libraries bar and baz do these bits well. Pick the best from each and let’s implement them here”
I’d not be surprised if npmjs.com and its ilk turn into more a reference site than a package manager backend soon.
Yes, it feels like they've been looking for an excuse to go closed-source, and this one is plausible enough to make it sound like they're only doing it because they "have to".
I'd think it's also much easier to spin up a (in some area) slightly better clone and eat into their revenue.
I mean, it's hard to make a viable business regardless of if the tech is OSS or not, but it's often seen as more challenging this way.
Exactly. I respect their decision to go closed source if that's what they need to do to make it a viable business, but just be honest about it. Don't make up some excuse around security and open source.