The corporations are watching

Commercial software is dying and open source is winning. Regular people with access to incredibly powerful AI models are making functional copies of commercial software without all the bloat, ads and telemetry. The quality of these recreations aside, the fact that you can point AI at a piece of software and reproduce some approximate version of it for insanely cheap, one that will not pester you about subscriptions, that will not lock basic features behind a paywall, and that will not purposefully become shitty over time, all while not tracking you and selling your data to other corporations is reason enough. The corporations are watching and they are scared.

How do you think they are going to respond?

They will trademark every feature they can, and spend more time on obfuscation than quality. An open-source 'recreation' will be a violation of their licensing terms. All frontier AI companies are watermarking their code. Any sufficiently large codebase with AI contributions will be flagged, and 'claimed'. We will no longer own any software written by their AI. Open weight models will be shut down and made illegal because they are 'too dangerous'. Hardware will be next to impossible to acquire unless you are one of them, so self-hosting is not an option. Heavy safeguards will be baked into the models to limit users from attempting to recreate commercial software (Of course, only software made by corporations that pay the AI companies to do so). They will do all this because the lawmakers are on their side.

How are you going to respond?