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Comment by splittydev | Hacker News Reader

Wasn't the entire goal of Ladybird to have an open and independent browser engine? Making it effectively closed to contributions makes it.. Not independent anymore. It's now dependent, on few people who work on it, just like any other closed-source or corporate-controlled browser.

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I don’t think that changes the project independence, when a project is open to PRs you have the same dependency on maintainers accepting changes into main. And the project is still open source. But that does make it less community oriented

But opensource has always been about community. This way it becomes "source-open", even if you could make changes to it and run those changes yourself, the latter doesn't sound "opensourcy" to me.

Open source is about rights/freedom, the community aspect is downstream from that. You have “source available” projects with active communities and external contributors (see elastic license v2.0 projects), and open source projects that only rely on core developers. With open source freedoms comes a culture of community oriented development but what makes a project open is the license, nothing else. The right to fork, read, run, edit is what matters.

Unfortunately AI tools are breaking the open community dynamics, it has become more and more expensive to run open community oriented projects due to the noise, it’s really a shame. It’s a lot to expect volunteer project members to triage the increasing amount of AI garbage

The open source definition does not mention community at all - it is a set of licensing requirements that certain rights to modify code must be maintained, not that upstream will accept your change or (for that matter) that you need to package it up and hand it to them.

And submitting a PR is almost wholly dissimilar from a conversation between friends over dinner or drinks. If you want to have a community around an open source project, it always has taken more than just accepting patches.

It is still independent in sense that it doesn't depend on Google Search money and Chrome/Firefox code as most of the alternative browsers. Depending on your definition of dependency, it will always going to be dependent on something.

Also they are not changing the licence or preventing forks.

It is a pragmatic solution to a real problem that can really clog down progress on the project. I hope they (and other open source projects) will figure out how to filter in good, responsible contributors but I guess it will take time.

Exactly! It's not opensource anymore: it's fork-or-transparent source.

Accepting contribution has never been a requirement for open source.

I know, but opensource was not just about freedoms, it was about community.

Open source has only ever been about freedoms. It has nothing to do with community.

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