Code got cheap. Proprietary software is next.

I’ve been thinking about proprietary software a lot lately.

For a long time the model made sense. Writing good software was expensive and slow. Companies spent a lot of time and money on it, so they locked the code up. If you wanted the same thing you either paid them or had to rebuild it yourself, which was a pain.

That’s changing now.

Code got cheap. AI tools make it way faster to put working software together. Stuff that used to take a team months can get built by a small group or even one person in a few weeks. When the code itself isn’t rare or expensive anymore, locking it up just doesn’t protect you like it used to.

Some companies still keep it closed for security or legal reasons, but even that is weaker than it looks. Closing the source doesn’t stop people from studying the product. They can still look at how it behaves, the APIs, the JavaScript that gets sent to the browser. AI is getting better at that kind of analysis too. All you’re really doing is cutting down the number of people who can help find problems on your side.

Doesn’t mean software businesses are dying though. Most people and companies still don’t want to build, host, and support every tool themselves. They’d rather just pay someone and not deal with it. Same reason people still go to restaurants even though they can cook at home, or take their car to a mechanic even though YouTube exists.

The simple one-trick tools are the ones getting hit hardest. A small team with decent AI tools can now challenge stuff that used to need a much bigger company. Just having the features isn’t enough anymore.

The valuable part used to be the code. Now it’s more the data, the users, the reliability, and the fact that someone else handles the messy parts when things break. AI can get you a rough version pretty fast. Making it solid and actually supporting it is still hard. That’s what people keep paying for.

Proprietary software as we knew it is on the way out.