Open Source After the Extraction

So what happens next? Open source doesn’t vanish. But it doesn’t recover either. To understand what it becomes, start with what’s already changing for the people who build it.

240 million downloads, zero feedback

I maintain tenacity, a retry library for Python. 240 million downloads last month. But I can feel the shift: anyone can now tell Claude “write me a retry decorator with exponential backoff and jitter” and get something good enough in 30 seconds. The library isn’t competing with other libraries anymore. It’s competing with generating the code on the fly.

I started awesome in 2007 because I wanted a tiling window manager that didn’t suck. Nobody was paying me. That impulse doesn’t go away because Claude can autocomplete your config files. But here’s the thing: I kept maintaining it because people used it. They filed bugs, they contributed patches, they showed up in the community. That feedback loop is what made the work feel worth doing.

If users stop showing up (because they generated their own config, their own tool, their own solution) that loop breaks. Starting a project still feels great. Maintaining one nobody engages with doesn’t. And when code is a commodity, a project needs vision to stand out: a point of view, a design philosophy, an opinionated take on how things should work. Open source used to reward craft. Now it rewards product thinking. Not everyone wants to be a product person.

The middle collapses

Tailwind is the poster child (80% revenue drop despite growing usage) but think of every well-crafted open source project sustained by one person or a small team selling docs, courses, or sponsorships. That entire tier is in trouble.

Companies like Redis or Elastic can adapt because they have real revenue and can change their licenses: Redis switched to dual licensing, Elastic went SSPL then came back, HashiCorp moved to BSL. Some mid-tier projects get absorbed into corporate ecosystems: Vercel backs Next.js, Cloudflare acquires Astro. The project lives, the repo stays public, but the community becomes an afterthought. It’s corporate R&D with a GitHub URL.

And new licenses are emerging to fight back. The PolyForm Shield restricts competitors from using your code. The Responsible AI License (RAIL) adds behavioral restrictions on AI use. Some projects are experimenting with clauses that explicitly prohibit feeding code into training datasets: you can use my code, but you can’t feed it to a model that will help your users bypass me entirely.

Whether these licenses will hold up in court is untested. But the fact that they’re emerging tells you something. When maintainers start lawyering up, the community era is over. The solo maintainer doesn’t have Redis’s resources to pivot. They either stop, or get acqui-hired by the companies that need their work.

The twist nobody sees coming

Here’s the thing that makes this hard to see clearly: open source looks healthier than ever from the outside.

Corporate open source output is actually increasing. Meta open-sources PyTorch and Llama to commoditize the AI stack and set the standards others build on. Google does the same with Kubernetes and Go. AI labs publish model weights so the ecosystem locks into their formats. More code than ever is landing in public repos.

But the word “open” is doing a lot of heavy lifting. These projects are strategic assets with public URLs. There’s no community, just suppliers and consumers. Linux, curl, PostgreSQL get funded not because people care, but because they’re supply chain dependencies (professionalized maintainers on corporate payrolls, a trend building for over 20 years). The corporate-backed projects were never communities to begin with.

Open source isn’t dying. It’s being industrialized. The old open source was a community. People showed up because they cared. They contributed because they were proud. They maintained because they were recognized. The economics were messy and implicit, but they were human. The new open source is a supply chain.

What’s left

I’ve been in open source for over 20 years. The thing I loved about it was never the code. It was the bug reports that turned into conversations. The patches from strangers who cared. The feeling of building something together that none of us could have built alone.

Some will argue AI lowers the barrier to contribute, that agents filing PRs and writing docs keeps the ecosystem healthy. Maybe. But a pull request from a bot isn’t the same as a patch from someone who cared enough to read your code and understand your design. The mechanical contribution survives. The human connection doesn’t.

The open source that comes next will produce good software. Maybe even better software, once infrastructure gets properly funded and AI tooling matures. But it’ll be lonelier. More transactional. Less weird.

The code will keep flowing. The community won’t.