FOSS has had a funding problem forever, and AI has made it exponentially worse by increasing the review and maintenance burden on volunteer maintainers and the infrastructure burden with scraping and agentic build workflows. The projects that are surviving best are the ones that have a funding source, which is typically businesses that financially benefit from the software (there are of course exceptions).
When the AI bubble pops, companies are going to be pulling back on all spending, so I expect donations to FOSS projects/foundations to get tight. The ones that will still be spending are the ones that will still have money to spend, and I don’t expect diverse views on AI to be distributed equally across those survivors.
If a distro gets filled with LLMs and those require upstream resources whether for frontier models or to maintain and update local models, that requires money. Some for that potential overhead, but also funding to support the development to implement those features.
If one distro spends resources to implement LLMs and another doesn’t, when that bubble pops, the group that invested will likely have less money having spent more.
What has money to do with this?
Anyway, I personally rather bet on the project’s founder’s stance.
FOSS has had a funding problem forever, and AI has made it exponentially worse by increasing the review and maintenance burden on volunteer maintainers and the infrastructure burden with scraping and agentic build workflows. The projects that are surviving best are the ones that have a funding source, which is typically businesses that financially benefit from the software (there are of course exceptions).
When the AI bubble pops, companies are going to be pulling back on all spending, so I expect donations to FOSS projects/foundations to get tight. The ones that will still be spending are the ones that will still have money to spend, and I don’t expect diverse views on AI to be distributed equally across those survivors.
If a distro gets filled with LLMs and those require upstream resources whether for frontier models or to maintain and update local models, that requires money. Some for that potential overhead, but also funding to support the development to implement those features.
If one distro spends resources to implement LLMs and another doesn’t, when that bubble pops, the group that invested will likely have less money having spent more.