I have pondered this a little, as to why this seems to be the route the administration is taking. The best explanation I’ve had is that Trump is taking a card from China’s playbook.
Several years back, China weakened their currency with the goal of creating an environment that’s more embracing to external companies wanting to setup manufacturing plants in their borders. With how this administration is speaking about boosting manufacturing, I can see these two narratives being in conjunction with one another. The problem I see here, though, is that those jobs were spurred on by lower wages as a result of that weaker currency, which I don’t quite see as a goal the US should be striving towards.
Yes, given enough time, it’ll pay itself back off, but this still seems like a subpar avenue, especially as one of those American workers that’ll feel the impact. Whether that’s truly the result or goal is anyone’s guess, best I can do is speculate.
As far as my applications for open-sourcing goes, AI has actually done a good number on assisting it.
I’m a DIY sort of person, and use a lot of software for things like ESP32 boards to complete niche tasks. The problem is that very many applications just didn’t have some preexisting code made for it, so it took a much larger load for me to try programming it by hand. In recent years, I’ve had a much easier time finding software for things, and sure enough, many of these projects have some mention or disclaimer about AI.
I know AI brings its own problems with it, namely that of code produced with lesser-optimized techniques, but the alternative I had to deal with was simply no premade code at all.
That being said, many of these projects did die out after AI was implemented, but not because the community was less interested, or the developers were less caring. These projects died because they reached their end goal, they did exactly what you needed it to do, no more or less. Far as I’m aware, that sounds like a successful outcome.