Nothing about this sentence makes sense. What don't you trust about code you can see and audit yourself? What's untrustworthy about "the best code and design in the world"?
Additionally, even if the code is good today, I am trusting their process will produce good code tomorrow (as migrating to/from bun has a non-trivial cost). A single person approving the code of an LLM is not such a process with today's technology.
It's analogous to saying "it's your fault because you didn't read the T&C's", when all the T&C's you've implicitly agreed to already would take more than a human lifetime to read and understand. That is not a reasonable implication or expectation for the vast majority of people, the vast majority of the time; therefore it is logically corrupt, and should not be entertained.
This is ofcourse a fair point of view for 1-few person codebases built for fun, or to solve their own problems, open sourced out of the kindness of their hearts, but when the open source code is built or maintained as part of a job function (receiving a paycheck) &/or to generate profit (either directly or indirectly to influence standards, gain market share, etc) the open-sourcing is more of a means to build trust and becon attention or adoption in the age of relentless enshittification.
Open sourcing should not be an accepted path for profit seeking orgs or individuals to exploit and screw over consumers, as though they are eternal beta testers whose trust and dependence are worthless externalities. It also completely ignores the time and effort consumers must invest themselves to learn your product, workaround any errors, and build it into their workflow. That is arguably worth significantly more than whatever fee they could pay you for your code.
People now yell at you that their only obligation is whatever is spelled out in the license they attached to the code. I think this is the same place where the logic of Code = Law comes from. People who think that you can encode the legal/judicial system into a set of axioms. This is not how the law works nor is it how it is taught and asserting this is a fundamental misunderstanding of human systems. It is incredibly destructive when people start applying maths as ground rules for human interaction. People do not live in black/white. We live in grey.
I am certainly not old enough to have experienced it, but I would venture a guess that the reason the BSD/MIT licenses originally existed was so that the universities had a CYA clause. I think you can see this erosion from a group of people sharing software in academic and hobbyist circles into weird legal absolutism as software becomes more of a business. For instance, Bill Gates’ famous letter to hobbyists or the PKZIP fiasco.
> People now yell at you that their only obligation is whatever is spelled out in the license they attached to the code.
Let’s turn your implied question around: if a person wants to share code without any expectation of care and maintenance, what should they do? Is the entire concept bogus, and the developer should just keep the code to themselves forever? Or put a “DO NOT USE FOR YOUR BILLION DOLLAR COMPANY” in a README? What communication other than the license could reasonably be provided?
I think the person you’re responding to made a pretty good point that open-source is sometimes the passion of an unpaid 1-person “team” and sometimes the product of a VC-funded attempt to buy goodwill. The idea that asking for more from maintainers is entitled is clearly suitable for the former case but not the latter. Now that Bun has been bought out perhaps they are more deserving of scrutiny.
> What communication other than the license could reasonably be provided?
Nobody encodes everything in text. No law can be fully represented in text. The law is a combination of many things including norms and customs at a moment in time. The law as written is a framework. This can be demonstrated pretty obviously in just how some laws are written intentionally vague because we have human beings to parse them for meaning and context. A legal/justice machine does not and will never exist as long as these are frameworks for human interaction. This is not a computable problem and attempting it to frame it as one is deeply harmful.
I have met a lot of EECS folks who think that the law is just a set of rules to be applied and that a consistent and fair decision will just “happen”. This is ridiculous and anyone who thinks this should be smacked with a copy of the Bluebook.
There is also kind of a spirit vs. letter of the law issue here. The intention and spirit in which this software is given out should and must inform how the law is interpreted. Arguing this isn't how the law works is just wrong. I stress this because it shows just how fuzzy the law really is. I think people want bright lines where they don't exist. I don't know what the obsession with this is, but it is unproductive.
I certainly understand that this desire to return to a more nuanced and more empathetic view of all of this has gradients, but I think I am just deeply saddened how any attempt to suggest that there were and should still be some implied cultural norms regarding expectations and the response from some folks really sounds like an angry Ayn Rand instead of a discussion about what that means. It’s just a blanket rejection for a lot of people here. Software is for people. The consumers are ultimately people. People are the only things that matter.
Like, you start a business and society—through the government and law has said—hey, you can’t refuse to serve people based on certain reasons. This is actively being attacked by some people with the same pathetic argument of, “You can’t tell me what to do. I hate X and it’s my free speech right to tell them to go pound sand. I never agreed to the civil rights acts!” It’s like the stupidest version of Ron Swanson.
But I still don’t understand what you actually expect from maintainers of free and open source software. In prior comments you have used words like “empathy” but I’m wondering in more specific terms what you mean. What should be maintained, and what should be abondoned? What should stay stable and what should be updated?
I ask because when you say stuff like
> I am just deeply saddened how any attempt to suggest that there were and should still be some implied cultural norms regarding expectations
I’d feel very differently about that comment based on the “expectations” that are “implied”.
And perhaps your answers might help me out a bit, to be honest. There are plenty of times when I use an open source library and get annoyed by the decisions of upstream developers, but I often wonder if my annoyance should be directed at upstream at all, or at myself.
I'm arguing FOR a base level of empathy and care FROM maintainers WHO CHOOSE to build for-profit products in the open, and that empathy for all parties should be the base expectation from a healthy community, rather than the narcissistic view of "nobody owes their communities anything, regardless of context".
The narssisist view leads to the behaviour of Minio, Bambu, etc becoming an accepted norm; to the abuse, exploitation, and deterioration of open source communities by for-profit orgs.
I was just expressing frustration that a lot of people seem to think this is imposing some kind of undue burden on them when I’ve always just thought of it as the cost of existing in society is to…have some empathy?
I've seen LLMs produce terrible code indeed, but I have also seen humans produce terrible code. I haven't dug in to JS runtimes specifically but have read plenty of code in openjdk and cpython - there are many points that could be done better, but there's also no point since it's working, and keeping working code unchanged tends to be a smart decision in software engineering.
So of course the last point brings up whether it was a good idea to rewrite bun if it was working. Apparently the bun team thought the difficulty in getting changes in zig upstream meant it is. I don't intend to hold LLM code to a higher bar than human code - notably if the runtime continues to work, that is as good as I can expect from what is otherwise a huge black box of extreme programming (not that agile kind).
An LLM can’t be trusted to produce code and make higher level project structure choices of the same quality at all times, because it can’t be trusted at all - trust is for deterministic systems. But still it begs us to trust it. Every prompt that yields good results sets us up to expect good results, so we get lazy - and then the next prompt it spews out garbage.
It means you need to be able to handle failure, but you should always have a good grip on how to correct if you intend to set things out in the real world which messes up everything always anyways.
Add to that, we’re very good at anthropomorphizing, and very bad at supervising systems that are usually right. Makes for a mess.
Oh, and this all relies on the ai providers not changing things up behind the scenes and feeding you a dumber model sometimes.
Claude Code & Prisma use it as of last week.
>> new codebase doesn’t have any
> No longer accurate. As of last week, Claude Code (an incredibly popular CLI tool) runs on Bun’s Rust rewrite.
Nobody knows if the Rust AI rewrite was a good decision from a technical pov. We do know it was a unilateral and drastic decision taken behind closed doors and imposed onto all Bun users.
There was a poll on r/bun where only about 30% of users said they were going to use the Rust port.
https://www.reddit.com/r/bun/comments/1u3j4d7/are_you_going_...
Even worse, users on the Zig version have been pretty much abandoned. Any future bug fixes, security patches, etc will only be released in the Rust version.
> Stability
ie: lack of volatility, ie: integrity, ie: I know it does what it says and don’t have to second guess that.