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Comment by max_on_hn | Hacker News Reader

I am incredibly eager to see what affordable coding agents can do for open source :) in fact, I should really be giving away CheepCode[0] credits to open source projects. Pending any sort of formal structure, if you see this comment and want free coding agent runs, email me and I’ll set you up!

[0] My headless coding agents product, similar to “assign to copilot” but works from your task board (Linear, Jira, etc) on multiple tasks in parallel. So far simple/routine features are already quite successful. In general the better the tests, the better the resulting code (and yes, it can and does write its own tests).

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> I am incredibly eager to see what affordable coding agents can do for open source :)

Oh, we know exactly what they will do: they will drive devs insane: https://www.reddit.com/r/ExperiencedDevs/comments/1krttqo/my...

I dunno, looking through those issues I'd be more annoyed by all the randos grandstanding in my PRs.

And not all the "fix this - i fixed - no you didn't - here's the fix — there's no fix" back and forth with the AI?

There's very little grandstanding in the comments. They are all very tame, all things considered.

Especially since the EU just made open source contributors liable for cybersecurity (Cyber Resilience Act). Just let AI contribute and ur good

Didn’t they make an exception for open-source projects? https://opensource.org/blog/the-european-regulators-listened...

Yeah, just the usual hn FUD about the EU.

Can you reconcile that with this sibling comment?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44074070

I don’t have an opinion, just trying to make sense of contradictory claims.

“Anyone opensourcing anything while in the course of ‘commercial activity’ will be fully liable. Effectively they rugpulled the Apache2 / MIT licenses... all opensource released by small businesses is fucked. where the was no red tape now there is infinite liability”

This is my current understanding, from a friend not a lawyer. Would appreciate any insight from folks here.

So you’re willfully spreading FUD in hopes someone will enlighten you?

The law is real. What emotions would you suggest are appropriate?

Open Source is exempt, provided you don’t make a profit: https://kevinboone.me/open_source_liability.html

So it applies to anyone who figures out how to monetize open-source contributions. Seems like a major issue to me. Not exactly something that makes Europe a good place for tech.

The US has the reputation that rich competitors will abuse the judicial system to sue you into bankruptcy. Still, a lot of people want to start their tech startup there.

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