AI-generated Code Copied from Open Source with Julian Coccia

The Business of Open Source

This week on The Business of Open Source, I spoke with Julian Coccia, CTO of ScanOSS, about selling access to data while making open source software. Of course, we also talked about being an open source company that is also deep in the open source world, helping companies understand their reliance on open source code and how open source is used in their codebase.

Several things that we talked about:

• AI and open source code. This is a topic that’s slightly tangential to business, but very interesting to me. If you’re using an AI code generator, you are almost certainly putting verbatim copies of open source code into your codebase, but without realizing you’re doing so and without any understanding of the license requirements. This is a huge compliance risk.
• 2% of code generated by AI is a verbatim copy of open source code.
• How the biggest challenges isn’t necessarily monetizing, but getting visibility into the sales funnel. It can feel random and sudden; a company appears out of nowhere ready to sign a contract because they’ve been using the open source project for months.

This is the last week to get tickets for Open Source Founders Summit, so if you want to join other leaders of open source companies May 19th and 20th in Paris, get your tickets now!