heise online reports on an opinion piece by Eric S. Raymond, co-founder of the Open Source Initiative, arguing that large language models spell the end of closed-source software. Raymond contends that AI-assisted decompilation and reimplementation remove the protection secrecy once provided, leaving only patents and software-as-a-service as viable moats, and predicts a hard collapse rather than gradual erosion, with at most niche survivors such as tax software whose value lies in continuously updated rules rather than code. He bases the claim on a personal experiment in which an AI assistant decompiled the DOS shareware game Firefighter and translated it into Rust for his Heritage Games Collection, saying the model inferred Borland Pascal from the data layout and produced readable code. On legality, he points to a US path modelled on Phoenix Technologies’ clean-room IBM PC BIOS work, where someone converts a binary into a specification and generates new code without looking at the decompiled output, now achievable in about a day. The article notes that security researchers take a more nuanced view, that obfuscation is cheaper to defeat but not worthless and that code signing and secure boot prevent modified code from running but not from being read, and that Raymond expects reverse engineering to expose long-hidden intellectual-property disputes.
Open-Source Guru Raymond: AI Ends Closed-Source Software
heise online reports on an opinion piece by Eric S. Raymond, co-founder of the Open Source Initiative, arguing that large language models spell the end of closed-source software. Raymond contends that AI-assisted decompilation and reimplementation remove the protection secrecy once provided, leaving only patents and software-as-a-service as viable moats, and predicts a hard collapse rather than gradual erosion, with at most niche survivors such as tax software whose value lies in continuously updated rules rather than code. He bases the claim on a personal experiment in which an AI assistant decompiled the DOS shareware game Firefighter and translated it into Rust for his Heritage Games Collection, saying the model inferred Borland Pascal from the data layout and produced readable code. On legality, he points to a US path modelled on Phoenix Technologies' clean-room IBM PC BIOS work, where someone converts a binary into a specification and generates new code without looking at the decompiled output, now achievable in about a day. The article notes that security researchers take a more nuanced view, that obfuscation is cheaper to defeat but not worthless and that code signing and secure boot prevent modified code from running but not from being read, and that Raymond expects reverse engineering to expose long-hidden intellectual-property disputes.
Source: Heise