alt Hacker NewsThe 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.
Replies
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.
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.