AI will make software free
Few days ago I was looking at a few completely different open source pieces of software: AI developer tools, Office.eu, Nextcloud, SteamOS and a brand new open source Adobe suite.
A European workspace, an open collaboration stack, a gaming operating system and a Photoshop clone do not look like the same story. But I think they are from a certain point of view. And thinking about it, I realized something.
For a while I believed open source would replace commercial consumer businesses around 2027-2028 with the AI boost. I do not think that goes far enough anymore. AI will make general software free and we'll just pay for the compute needed to run it.
I am not convinced it would be the end of those companies. Microsoft still had 89 million Microsoft 365 Consumer subscribers in fiscal 2025, and Adobe reported $17.4 billion of Digital Media subscription revenue. Very large businesses for now. But a lot of that exists because paying is still the default, not because the software is impossible to replace.
Look at what people actually pay for: software for Office documents, PDFs, photo cleanup, design assets, video editing, notes, small utilities. In most of these categories an open source alternative already exists. It just loses on polish, onboarding, import/export, and the last annoying 20 percent.
I believe that AI will remove that 20 percent. Stack Overflow's 2025 survey had 84% of respondents using or planning to use AI tools in development, and this is exactly what they are good at. Fixing paper cuts, writing file converters, plugins, documentation. And when the code is open, the AI can change the product itself instead of only explaining why it is annoying. Closed software has a support channel. Open source has a patch.
AI agents will easily make the open source software work the way you want. For every user, their own interface. No more adapting to new software interfaces. Just tell your AI how you want the software to work. Few seconds/minutes/hours later, it will behave exactly the same way.
Once patches are cheap, charging for the product stops working. Companies will still sell hosting, support and cloud storage. But the cost of the software itself goes towards zero.
And AI itself is going the same way. Open source models already run on consumer-grade hardware and they keep getting better. At some point the only thing left to pay for is the AI compute itself. Not the app, not the license. Just the chips doing the work.
These hypotheses are not theoretical anymore. ArtCraft released seven free, open source apps that recreate Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere, Lightroom, Acrobat, After Effects and InDesign, built in Rust by one developer, Brandon Thomas, with Claude doing most of the coding. The apps are early alpha, rough, very much a work in progress. But they exist, they run on macOS, Windows and Linux, and they only get better from here. I do not think they replace Adobe today. But it will be possible to replace it tomorrow.
That is, if we can keep enough people from around the world contributing to these projects with security and architectural patches.
Open source is already growing at an unprecedented pace. Office.eu launched as a fully European alternative to Microsoft Office and Google Workspace, and underneath it is Nextcloud, free and open source. A normal organization can buy the open stack today.
Last but not least, gaming was supposed to be the impossible one. SteamOS runs on Linux, and Proton, the layer that makes many Windows games work, is developed in public. If open source can hide inside a handheld console, it does not need to convince anyone to become technical. It only needs to get good enough that people stop paying for the alternative.
Opus 5.5 can now build games in Unreal, Unity, Godot or simply in the browser.
The timing is the part where I am guessing. It could be two years, it could be five, and I honestly do not know which. But the direction is clear. The price of consumer software is going towards zero, and AI is what takes it there.
Talking about this is easy, so I am going to prove it. Every week for the next 3 months I will release one open source tool that has the potential to replace a popular paid app or SaaS. Free, MIT licensed, with the code public. This week's is OpenGlaido, dictation with your own models and no subscription. One down.
Free software for everyone, a vision conceived by Richard Stallman in 1983. I think that is where this story actually ends.