Leaf ML framework ends development

medium.com

38 points·andr··5 comments

What's really sad about this is that they had to give up Leaf because the whole thing was VC-backed. Commercial support is a huge part of open source software's viability.

I applaud their decision to pivot and shift their focus elsewhere to win. That said, the irony is too great for me not to mention: open sourcing is now recognized as a hugely democratizing force in the software world to upend commercial giants, yet it's commercial giants that can afford to invest in the long run and support open source projects (so that they can increase the sphere of their influence).

Thanks for sharing on HN. Rust community's discussion on Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/4ij2ub/googles_tensor...

They place an emphasis on Github star count, but that is a terrible usage metric. Leaf got a lot of stars because it got a lot of HN exposure, but at the same time Leaf had no users. Assumedly that's the real reason why they are stopping development.

Here are the metrics that matter.

Over the lifetime of the project:

- 14 contributors

- 40 issues opened

- 161 forks

In the past month:

- 7 issues opened

- 6 PRs opened

In the past week:

- 0 issues opened

- 0 PRs opened

In other words, a ghost town. The lesson here is that a lot of HN exposure does not automatically convert into a lot of users.

Yes, we had trouble to attract the right community and convert the stars into recurrent contributions, as there was less overlap between the Rust and the general ML community than we anticipated. This bothered us a lot and played a role in our decision to suspend Leaf.

This is sad. Diversity of implementations is a plus.

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