Without commenting on Microsoft and Adobe specifically, because I couldn’t care less about their fates, I find the prospect of no longer being able to make a living from making and selling software deeply depressing.
I could put my heart and soul into an app, stick it on a marketplace, and someone gets their LLM to RE the binary back into source code to repackage and distribute it. LLMs were built on theft but now they enable even more of it. As a SWE I’m quite demoralised.
I really did want to get out of selling my hours to an evil corporation by instead selling my own works of passion as apps, but this has really thrown a spanner in the works. I don’t want to have to use an always-online SaaS/licencing model instead, because I believe consumers should own things. This does feel like the final straw pushing me out of software entirely.
Without commenting on Microsoft and Adobe specifically, because I couldn’t care less about their fates, I find the prospect of no longer being able to make a living from making and selling software deeply depressing.
I could put my heart and soul into an app, stick it on a marketplace, and someone gets their LLM to RE the binary back into source code to repackage and distribute it. LLMs were built on theft but now they enable even more of it. As a SWE I’m quite demoralised.
I really did want to get out of selling my hours to an evil corporation by instead selling my own works of passion as apps, but this has really thrown a spanner in the works. I don’t want to have to use an always-online SaaS/licencing model instead, because I believe consumers should own things. This does feel like the final straw pushing me out of software entirely.