--- id: "202610132127" title: "Private code and private science lose their value" type: permanent status: open-question source: "Matheus Hoffmann, messages to friend3, 2026-10-13: his own words, thinking out loud; nothing here is friend3's" tags: [closed-source, agents, reverse-engineering, science] created: 2026-10-13 --- # Private code and private science lose their value My position, as I said it to friend3: in the long term, private code has no commercial value, and private science has none either. With agents, two things grow very fast: reverse engineering and science. Somebody will reverse engineer your papers, and everybody else's. The time of making money by keeping software shut is ending soon. That is why I now make only open work. I gave the same warning to a colleague who planned to write code for a contract with a large company, all of it sealed. **Status: open question.** This is a forecast and my own position, not a fact with a source. What would support it: a recorded case where agents rebuilt a closed product or a paper's method, and a measure of what the owner lost. **What I am speaking of.** - The book: *Closed Source: The God that Failed* (Hoffmann, 2026), DOI [10.5281/zenodo.23333656](https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.23333656). Section 5, "Closed source is dead" (`papers/closed-source/prose/05-closed-source-is-dead.md`), makes this argument with its sources; Section 4 has the cases of distillation and model extraction. - "Only open work": the three other works of mine that the book's Zenodo record cites ([`RELATED_WORK.md`](../RELATED_WORK.md)): marola, [10.5281/zenodo.23224155](https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.23224155); WW3 GPU Lab, [10.5281/zenodo.23221351](https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.23221351); picasso, [10.5281/zenodo.23311208](https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.23311208). - friend1 said a close thing: [[202610122239-espionage-and-agents-at-scale]]. That note also waits for a documented case. What the claim is not: [[202610132128-not-against-property-copy-professionally]]. One piece of evidence for the part about documents: [[202610132129-rhizome-ai-one-founder-on-documents]]. Easy version in Portuguese: [easy/202610132127-private-code-and-private-science-lose-their-value.easy.pt-BR.md](easy/202610132127-private-code-and-private-science-lose-their-value.easy.pt-BR.md).