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Comment by jerkstate | Hacker News Reader

Thats fine, the cost for me to re-implement your code is nearly zero now, I don’t have to cajole you into fixing problems anymore.

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This is obviously in an open source environment. You never needed to cajole them into fixing problems, you could just fix it yourself. That was always an option. That's literally the entire point of open source.

People doing work doing work that you can take for free to make money off of is another big point of open source you can't ignore.

It seems like quite a tower of babel just waiting to happen.. All those libraries that once had thought go into tangled consequences of supporting new similar features and once had ways to identity for their security updates needed will all just be defective clones with 5%-95% compatibility for security exploits and support for integrations that are mostly right but a little hallucinated?

I think it's more likely that libraries will give way to specified interfaces. Good libraries that provide clean interfaces with a small surface area will be much less affected by thos compared to frameworks that like to be a part of everything you do.

The JavaScript ecosystem is a good demonstration of a platform that is encumbered with layers that can only ever perform the abilities provivded by the underlying platform while adding additional interfaces that, while easier for some to use, frequently provide a lot of functionality a program might not need.

Adding features as a superset of a specification allows compatibility between users of a base specification, failure to interoperate would require violating the base spec, and then they are just making a different thing.

Bugs are still bugs, whether a human or AI made them, or fixed them. Let's just address those as we find them.

I could certainly see that direction earlier in some communities, but reaching agreement on specs seems like the opposite of where distributed low cost code writing is headed.. I.e. I like 20% of your OSS library and have one different opinion so I pull part of it in directly, change something, and ask an LLM to freshen it where that should mean what the LLM thinks I usually mean which is kind of like what some other people mean.

Given the supposed quality of top flight models there ought to be a lot more people forking open source projects, implementing missing features and releasing "xyz software that can do a and b".

Somehow it's not really happening.

I've actually been doing this for my own purposes - an adhoc buggy half-implemented low latency version of Project Wyoming from home assistant.

Repo, for those interested: https://github.com/jaggederest/pronghorn/

I find that the core issues really revolve around the audience - getting it good enough that I can use it for my own purposes, where I know the bugs and issues and understand how to use it, on the specific hardware, is fabulous. Getting it from there to "anyone with relatively low technical knowledge beyond the ability to set up home assistant", and "compatible with all the various RPi/smallboard computers" is a pretty enormous amount of work. So I suspect we'll see a lot of "homemade" software that is definitely not salable, but is definitely valuable and useful for the individual.

I hope, over the long to medium term, that these sorts of things will converge in an "rising tide lifts all boats" way so that the ecosystem is healthier and more vibrant, but I worry that what we may see is a resurgence of shovelware.

I have already forked open source software to fix issues or enhance it via coding agents. I put it on github publicly, so other people can use it if they see it, but I don't announce it anywhere. I don't want to deal with user complaints any more than the current maintainers do. (I'm also not going to post my github profile here since it has my legal name and is trivially linked to my home address.)

Because it still requires the desire to do it.

The cost of forking open source code was always effectively zero.

It's not really, because you now have the cost of maintaining that fork, even if it's just for yourself.

Which is still true in our brave new llm world.

That may be part of the issue. Perhaps LLMs are just causing people to reveal how much they consider a maintainer as providing a service for them. Maintainers don't work for you, they let you benefit from the service they perform.

That workload of maintaining a fork doesn't come from nowhere, it's just a workload someone else would have to do before the fork occured.

I'm talking about the literal process of forking an open source project. You're just making a copy of a set of files.

This is an unethical take, and long-term and at scale, an unsustainable/impractical one. This kind of mindset results in tool fragmentation, erosion of trust, and ultimately worse quality in software.

So you're saying people forking open source software is "unethical"? What is open source then? Just a polite offer that it is rude to accept?

As a sidenote: what's with the usage of "take" to designate an opinion instead of the word "opinion" or "view"?

Open-source is heavily community-oriented, and yes, I think that subverting the contributions of the community like this (and honestly, just kind of being a dick about it) is unethical, yeah. It erodes the fabric of open source, and will be detrimental not just to OSS, but to the field of software in the medium and long term for the reasons I stated earlier.

To your side note: "take" is a very common synonym for "thought"/"opinion"/"view" in the version (dialect? I guess?) of English I grew up with. If you're unfamiliar with it, that might be a regional or generational effect. I don't know. I'm not a linguist.

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