Cal.com is going closed source

(cal.com)

51 points | by Benjamin_Dobell 2 hours ago ago

79 comments

  • simonw 2 hours ago

    Drew Breunig published a very relevant piece yesterday that came to the opposite conclusion: https://www.dbreunig.com/2026/04/14/cybersecurity-is-proof-o...

    Since security exploits can now be found by spending tokens, open source is MORE valuable because open source libraries can share that auditing budget while closed source software has to find all the exploits themselves in private.

    > If Mythos continues to find exploits so long as you keep throwing money at it, security is reduced to a brutally simple equation: to harden a system you need to spend more tokens discovering exploits than attackers will spend exploiting them.

    • mgdev an hour ago

      This is an economically sound conclusion.

      It also means that you need to extract enough value to cover the cost of said tokens, or reduce the economic benefit of finding exploits.

      Reducing economic benefit largely comes down to reducing distribution (breadth) and reducing system privilege (depth).

      One way to reduce distribution is to, raise the price.

      Another is to make a worse product.

      Naturally, less valuable software is not a desirable outcome. So either you reduce the cost of keeping open (by making closed), or increase the price to cover the cost of keeping open (which, again, also decreases distribution).

      The economics of software are going to massively reconfigure in the coming years, open source most of all.

      I suspect we'll see more 'open spec' software, with actual source generated on-demand (or near to it) by models. Then all the security and governance will happen at the model layer.

    • DrammBA an hour ago

      I have a feeling the real reason is them trying to avoid someone using AI to copyright-wash their product, they're just using security as the excuse.

    • pietz an hour ago

      This conclusion makes more sense to me, but maybe I'm too naive.

      The media momentum of this threat really came with Mythos, which was like 2 or 3 weeks ago? That seems like a fairly short time to pivot your core principles like that. It sounds to me like they wanted to do this for other business related reasons, but now found an excuse they can sell to the public.

      (I might be very wrong here)

    • skybrian an hour ago

      This seems similar to the lesson learned for cryptographic libraries where open source libraries vetted by experts become the most trusted.

      Your average open source library isn’t going to get that scrutiny, though. It seems like it will result in consolidation around a few popular libraries in each category?

    • criddell an hour ago

      How may open source libraries have auditing budgets?

      • simonw an hour ago

        I expect we're about to find that it's a lot easier to convince a company to spend money running an AI security scan of their dependencies and sharing the results with the maintainers than it is to have them give those maintainers money directly.

        (I just hope they can learn to verify the exploits are valid before sharing them!)

      • Mordisquitos an hour ago

        Their commercial users have auditing budgets.

        • dspillett an hour ago

          Does your ideal world have an easy path to citizenship?

          I might like to live there.

    • not-chatgpt an hour ago

      Security should be a non issue in the age of AI now that auditing is cheaper than ever.

      I'd give them more credits if they use the AI slop unmaintainability argument.

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  • ButlerianJihad 2 hours ago

    This seems kind of crazy. If LLMs are so stunningly good at finding vulnerabilities in code, then shouldn't the solution be to run an LLM against your code after you commit, and before you release it? Then you basically have pentesting harnesses all to yourself before going public. If an LLM can't find any flaws, then you are good to release that code.

    A few years ago, I invoked Linus's Law in a classroom, and I was roundly debunked. Isn't it a shame that it's basically been fulfilled now with LLMs?

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linus%27s_law

    • samename an hour ago

      That’s a non-trivial cost for commonly severely underfunded open source projects

      • yawndex an hour ago

        Cal.com is not a severely underfunded project, it raised around $32M of VC money.

    • vlapec an hour ago

      LLMs really are stunningly good at finding vulnerabilities in code, which is why, with closed-source code, you can and probably will use them to make your code as secure as possible.

      But you won't keep the doors open for others to use them against it.

      So it is, unfortunately, understandable in a way...

      • paprikanotfound an hour ago

        I'm not a security expert but can't close source applications be vulnerable and exploited too? I feel like using close source as a defense is just giving you a false sense of security.

        • pixel_popping 10 minutes ago

          Delaying attacks is a form of valid security.

    • fwip an hour ago

      It's entirely possible to address all the LLM-found issues and get an "all green" response, and have an attacker still find issues that your LLM did not. Either they used a different model, a different prompt, or spent more money than you did.

      It's not a symmetric game, either. On defense, you have to get lucky every time - the attacker only has to get lucky once.

      • an hour ago
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      • earthnail an hour ago

        > It's not a symmetric game, either. On defense, you have to get lucky every time - the attacker only has to get lucky once.

        This! I love OSS but this argument seems to get overlooked in most of the comments here.

    • dgellow an hour ago

      I mean, you should definitely have _some_ level of audit by LLMs before you ship, as part of the general PR process.

      But you might need thousands of sessions to uncover some vulnerabilities, and you don’t want to stop shipping changes because the security checks are taking hours to run

  • gouthamve 2 hours ago

    This is a weird knee-jerk reaction. I feel like this is more a business decision than a security decision.

    I feel like with AI, self-hosting software reliably is becoming easier so the incentives to pay for a hosted service of an OSS project are going down.

    • fhn an hour ago

      Yeah, I don't buy it. If they don't want these security reports, ignore them and continue your path. Blaming AI is just an excuse to close source. If you don't want AI to learn from your code, too late. Add genetic algorithms and fuzzing into AI and it can iterate and learn a billion times faster, no need to learn for humans.

    • esafak an hour ago
    • badgersnake an hour ago

      AI is certainly getting a lot of milage as an excuse for doing bad things.

      Wanna sack a load of staff? - AI

      Wanna cut your consumer products division? - AI

      Wanna take away the source? - AI

  • doytch 2 hours ago

    I get the mentality but it feels very much like security through obscurity. When did we decide that that was the correct model?

    • 1970-01-01 an hour ago

      This is not security via obscurity; it is reducing your attack surface as much as possible.

      • dspillett an hour ago

        Reducing your attack surface as much as possible via obscurity.

        • 1970-01-01 3 minutes ago

          Going closed source is making the branch secret/private, not making it obscure. Obscurity would be zipping up the open source code (without a password) and leaving it online. Obscurity is just called taking additional steps to recover the information. Your passwords are not obscure strings of characters, they are secrets.

    • Peer_Rich 2 hours ago

      hey cofounder here. since it takes my 16 year old neighbors son 15 mins and $100 claude code credits to hack your open source project

      • doytch 2 hours ago

        Right, but those capabilities are available to you as well. Granted the remediation effort will take longer but...you're going to do that for any existing issues _anyway_ right?

        I understand why this is a tempting thing to do in a "STOP THE PRESSES" manner where you take a breather and fix any existing issues that snuck through. I don't yet understand why when you reach steady-state, you wouldn't rely on the same tooling in a proactive manner to prevent issues from being shipped.

        And if you say "yeah, that's obv the plan," well then I don't understand what going closed-source _now_ actually accomplishes with the horses already out of the barn.

        • throwaway5752 2 hours ago

          > those capabilities are available to you as well

          Give him $100 to obtain that capability.

          Give each open source project maintainer $100.

          Or internalize the cost if they all decide the hassle of maintaining an open source project is not worth it any more.

          I'm not aiming this reply at you specific, but it's the general dynamic of this crisis. The real answer is for the foundational model providers to give this money. But instead, at least one seems to care more about acquiring critical open source companies.

          We should openly talk about this - the existing open source model is being killed by LLMs, and there is no clear replacement.

      • simonw 2 hours ago

        Are you at all worried that the message you are spreading here is "We are no longer confident in our own ability to secure your data?"

        • wild_egg 2 hours ago

          That's exactly the message I got from the video

      • toast0 an hour ago

        I don't think this really helps that much. Your neighbor could ask an LLM to decompile your binaries, and then run security analysis on the results.

        If the tool correctly says you've got security issues, trying to hide them won't work. You still have the security issues and someone is going to find them.

      • wild_egg 2 hours ago

        It only takes 20 minutes and $200 to hack a closed source one too though. LLMs are ludicrously good at using reverse engineering tools and having source available to inspect just makes it slightly more convenient.

      • sambaumann 2 hours ago

        Couldn't you just spend those $100 on claude code credits yourself and make sure you're not shipping insecure software? Security by obscurity is not the correct model (IMO)

      • bayindirh an hour ago

        Why not can’t you (as in Cal.com) spend that amount of money and find vulnerabilities yourself?

        You can keep the untested branch closed if you want to go with “cathedral” model, even.

      • senko an hour ago

        What makes you think it'll take him more than 16 mins and $110 claude code credits to hack your closed source project?

      • pdntspa an hour ago

        whooptie fuggin doo, then spend $200 on finding and fixing the issues before you push your commits to the cloud

      • discordianfish 2 hours ago

        Please, go ahead!

      • ErroneousBosh an hour ago

        > since it takes my 16 year old neighbors son 15 mins and $100 claude code credits to hack your open source project

        To what end? You can just look at the code. It's right there. You don't need to "hack" anything.

        If you want to "hack on it", you're welcome to do so.

        Would you like to take a look at some of my open-source projects your neighbour's kid might like to hack on?

      • bakugo an hour ago

        *This comment sponsored by Anthropic

      • hypeatei an hour ago

        > neighbors son 15 mins and $100 claude code credits

        Is that true? Didn't the Mythos release say they spent $20k? I'm also skeptical of Anthropic here doing essentially what amounts to "vague posting" in an attempt scare everyone and drive up their value before IPO.

  • tudorg an hour ago

    It's funny that this news showed up just as we (Xata) have gone the other direction, citing also changes due to AI: https://xata.io/blog/open-source-postgres-branching-copy-on-...

    We did consider arguments in both directions (e.g. easier to recreate the code, agents can understand better how it works), but I honestly think the security argument goes for open source: the OSS projects will get more scrutiny faster, which means bugs won't linger around.

    Time will tell, I am in the open source camp, though.

  • iancarroll an hour ago

    I know plenty of security researchers who exclusively use Claude Code and other tools for blackbox testing against sites they don’t have the source code for. It seems like shutting down the entire product is the only safe decision here!

  • _pdp_ an hour ago

    The real threat is not security but bad actors copying your code and calling it theirs.

    IMHO, open source will continue to exist and it will be successful but the existence of AI is deterrent for most. Lets be honest, in recent times the only reason startups went open source first was to build a community and build organic growth engine powered by early adaptors. Now this is no longer viable and in fact it is simply helping competitors. So why do it then?

    The only open source that will remain will be the real open source projects that are true to the ethos.

    • evanjrowley an hour ago

      I agree with you that AI's disruption of attribution is a much bigger problem, but it's also worth recognizing that not everyone has this same motivation. It mostly affects copyleft open source licenses.

      Attribution isn't required for permissive many open source licenses. Dependencies with those licenses will oftentimes end up inside closed source software. Even if there isn't FOSS in the closed-source software, basically everyone's threat model includes (or should include) "OpenSSL CVE". On that basis, I doubt Cal is accomplishing as much as they hope to by going closed source.

    • fcarraldo an hour ago

      > The real threat is not security but bad actors copying your code and calling it theirs.

      How has this changed?

      • HyprMusic an hour ago

        Bad actors can rewrite it with AI and claim ownership of the result.

  • woodruffw 2 hours ago

    Today, it's easy to (publicly) evaluate the ability of LLMs to find bugs in open source codebases, because you don't need to ask permission. But this doesn't actually tell us the negative statement, which is that an LLM won't just as effectively find bugs in closed codebases, including through black-box testing, reverse engineering, etc.

    If the null hypothesis is that LLMs are good at finding bugs, full stop, then it's unclear to me that going closed actually does much to stop your adversary (particularly as a service operator).

  • poisonborz 17 minutes ago

    AI sure is useful as a scapegoat for any negative PR inducing moves.

  • evanjrowley an hour ago

    Juxtapose this with the fact that many HNers will decry strong copyleft FOSS licenses as not being truly "open source" - the reality is that closed source software is still full of open-source non-copyleft dependencies. Unless you're rolling your own encryption and TCP stack, being closed source will not be the easy solution that many imagine it to be.

  • bearsyankees 2 hours ago

    Think this is a bad, bad move...

    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47780712

  • andsoitis 2 hours ago

    > Today, we are making the very difficult decision to move to closed source, and there’s one simple reason: security.

    It seems like an easy decision, not a difficult one.

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  • adamtaylor_13 an hour ago

    Could you not simply point AI at your open source codebase and use it to red-team your own codebase?

    This post's argument seems circular to me.

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  • asdev an hour ago

    Who even uses their open source product?

  • nativeit an hour ago

    I guess why fix vulnerabilities when you can just obscure them?

  • tokai an hour ago

    Security through obscurity has been known to be a faulty approach for nearly 200 years. Yet here we are.

  • dec0dedab0de an hour ago

    This seems dishonest, like someone is forcing the decision for other reasons, and they're using security and AI as a distraction.

  • creatonez an hour ago

    This is some truly exceptionally clownish attention seeking nonsense. The rationale here is complete nonsense, they just wanted to put "because AI" after announcing their completely self-serving decision. If AI cyber offense is such a concern, recognize your role as a company handling truckloads of highly sensitive information and actually fix your security culture instead of just obscuring it.

    • jhatemyjob an hour ago

      I mean it's not complete nonsense, but yeah, doing it for security reasons sounds like BS. I actually thought this was going to be about how AI makes it super easy for someone to steal all their code and fold it into their own competing project. I've seen a few open source projects get sideswiped by this, AI is pretty good at copying code (and obfuscating the fact that it was copied). I suspect that's the real reason but it doesn't sound as good. So they went with this half-truth.

  • hmokiguess an hour ago

    Risk tolerance and emotional capacity differs from one individual to another, while I may disagree with the decision I am able to respect the decision.

    That said, I think it’s important to try and recognize where things are from multiple angles rather than bucket things from your filter bubble alone, fear sells and we need to stop buying into it.

  • righthand an hour ago

    This is the future now that AI is here. Publishing is going to be dead, look at the tea leaves, how many engineers are claiming they don’t use package managers anymore and just generate dependencies? 5 years and no one will be making an argument for open source or blogging.

  • barelysapient an hour ago

    I hate how this sounds...but this reads to me "we lack the confidence in our code security so we're closing the source code to conceal vulnerabilities which may exist."

  • popalchemist an hour ago

    Seems like it's just being used as a convenient pretense to back out of open-source.

  • zb3 2 hours ago

    This has to be the most bullshit reason I've seen.. if AI can be pointed and find vulnerabilities then do it yourself before publishing the code.

    • dspillett an hour ago

      > if AI can be pointed and find vulnerabilities then do it yourself before publishing the code

      At your cost.

      Every time you push. (or if not that, at least every time there is a new version that you call a release)

      Including every time a dependency updates, unless you pin specific versions.

      I assume (caveat: I've not looked into the costs) many projects can't justify that.

      Though I don't disagree with you that this looks like a commercial decision with “LLM based bug finders could find all our bad code” as an excuse. The lack of confidence in their own code while open does not instil confidence that it'll be secure enough to trust now closed.

      • zb3 9 minutes ago

        For-profit companies using open-source software should bear that cost - that's my position.

        I believe than N companies using an open source project and contributing back would make this burden smaller than one company using the same closed-source project.

  • rvz 2 hours ago

    You know what?

    Great move.

    Open-source supporters don't have a sustainable answer to the fact that AI models can easily find N-day vulnerabilities extremely quickly and swamp maintainers with issues and bug-reports left hanging for days.

    Unfortunately, this is where it is going and the open-source software supporters did not for-see the downsides of open source maintenance in the age of AI especially for businesses with "open-core" products.

    Might as well close-source them to slow the attackers (with LLMs) down. Even SQLite has closed-sourced their tests which is another good idea.

    • hayleox an hour ago

      The tools are available to everyone. It's becoming easier for hackers to attack you at the same speed that it's becoming easier for you to harden your systems. When everyone gains the same advantage at the same time, nothing has really changed.

      It makes me think of how great chess engines have affected competitive chess over the last few years. Sure, the ceiling for Elo ratings at the top levels has gone up, but it's still a fair game because everyone has access to the new tools. High-level players aren't necessarily spending more time on prep than they were before; they're just getting more value out of the hours they do spend.

      • popalchemist an hour ago

        I agree it's a shit tactic, but one thing I can say for those running software businesses is that it's not an equivalent linear increase on both sides. It's asymmetric, because # of both attackers and the amount of attack surface (exposed 3rd party dependencies, for example) is near infinite, with no opportunity cost for failure by the bad actors (hackers). However a single failure can bring down a company, particularly when they may be hosting sensitive user data that could ruin their customers' businesses or lives.

        I think Cal are making the wrong call, and abandoning their principles. But it isn't fair to say the game is accelerating in a proportionate way.

        See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2CieKDg-JrA

        Ultimately, he concludes that while in the short run the game defines the players' actions, an environment that makes cooperation too risky naturally forces participants to stop cooperating to protect themselves from being "exploited" (this bit is around 34:39 - 34:46)

        • hayleox an hour ago

          Sure, I can see that to a degree. And there definitely is a bit of chaos during the transition period as everyone scrambles to figure out what the landscape looks like now. I could understand if they decided to temporarily do less-frequent code releases, or maybe release their code on a delay or something, while they wait for the dust to settle. But I don't think permanently ending open source development is the right move.

    • wild_egg an hour ago

      Haven't the SQLite tests always been closed? Getting access to them is a major reason for financially supporting them

    • zb3 an hour ago

      > especially for businesses with "open-core" products.

      Then good, that overengineered, intentionally-crippled crap should go away.

    • 2 hours ago
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