I honestly think that partially-OSS SaaS is in for a rocky road; many popular paid or freemium tools are likely to be rewritten by AI and published as OSS with permissive licenses over the next year or two.

I also think that the same capability will largely invalidate the GPL, as people point agents at GPL software and write new software that performs the same function as OSS with more permissive licenses.

My reasoning is this: the reason that people use OSS versions of software that has restrictive licensing terms, is because it’s not worth the effort to them to rewrite.

Corporations certainly, but also individuals, will be able to use similar approaches to what these people used, and in a day or two come back to a mostly-functional (but buggy) new software package that does most of what the original did, but now you have a brand new software that you control completely and you are not beholden to or restricted by anyone.

Next time someone tries to pull an ElasticSearch license trick on AWS, AWS will just point one or a thousand agents at the source and get a brand new workalike in a week written in their language du jour, and have it fully functional in a couple of months.

Doesn’t circumvent patent or trademark issues but it’ll be hard to assert that it’s not a new work, esp. if it’s in an entirely different language.

Just something I’ve been thinking about recently, that LLM agents change the game when it comes to software licensing.

> partially-OSS SaaS is in for a rocky road

Agent-in-a-loop gets you remarkably far today already. It's not straightforward to "rip" capability even when you have the code, but we're getting closer by the week to being able to go "Project X has capability Y. Use [$approach] and port this into our project". This HAS to put a fat question mark over the viability of any SaaS that makes their code visible.