Closing Canario Terminal source code
rapha.land
rapha.land
My only exception to this article is the section, "People underestimate what open source costs from the maintainer side. It’s not just writing code. It’s issues, pull requests, discussions, people demanding things from you for free. I got spammed like crazy. And now with AI, spamming a maintainer is so easy: low effort issues, generated pull requests, and every single one of them takes a bit of your time and energy"
This is all self-inflicted. Don't take Issues. Don't take PRs. Make the repo read-only to everyone but you. There's zero effort, unless you're planning on keeping all the source on your computer and never push it anywhere. Well, I guess, in that case you're saving yourself from doing a push.
So if you don't want to do all that stuff, that's fine. You don't have to. But don't pretend the only alternative is to close the source.
Maybe people will see the giant list of issues and PRs and be concerned, but if you put a note at the top of the README indicating that's what's going on, the only people who won't notice (or won't accept it) it are the ones that you're probably trying to avoid with this strategy anyhow, so it's no loss to have them go elsewhere.
Amiga had the Fish disks, PC had all the whateverware variants during its MS-DOS days.
8 bits naturally had the magazine listings to type in.
Bell Labs/AT&T claimed exclusive ownership of Unix, and the exclusive right to license it, right up to the BSD case in the early 1990s, where it was determined that AT&T had used Berkeley code, and vice versa, to the point where copyright notices were essentially fiction. Berkeley Software Design had to remove a small number of files from their distribution, and then System V and BSD could go their own separate ways.
A terminal is critical software, you type passwords into it, it sees all the output, you need to trust it, so while I'm sad to find out about this project only today, the closed-source is indeed a deal-breaker for me
Not that this really addresses the point that you were making, but at least the git blame part is pretty solvable by just using a throwaway email for the commits. If you're already not caring about getting contributions, you could even rewrite history to amend everything to use the new email retroactively!
/s
For better or worse we live in a society. Even being perceived and having a simulacrum of you in someone's head, much less a collective simulacrum in many people's heads is restrictive. Every facet of yourself you reveal to is another string tied upon you. I'm not here to argue one way or another what you should do, but it is not self inflicted, it is a fact of social existence. Even to have the discipline to ignore an email can be taxing, especially if you view the person on the other end as a human. Just being made aware of a bug, or a different way of structuring things is an infohazard if your goal is to just have fun doing things your way. I think closing the source like this is a fairly drastic course of action, but there's plenty of things I've written that aren't open source for the same reasons, even though I'd like them to be, I'd rather be a hermit about it just because the vibe is better.
"SQLite is open-source, meaning that you can make as many copies of it as you want and do whatever you want with those copies, without limitation. But SQLite is not open-contribution. In order to keep SQLite in the public domain and ensure that the code does not become contaminated with proprietary or licensed content, the project does not accept patches from people who have not submitted an affidavit dedicating their contribution into the public domain."
The more relevant quote is: "In order to keep SQLite completely free and unencumbered by copyright, the project does not accept patches from random people on the internet. There is a process to get a patch accepted, but that process is involved and for smaller changes is not normally worth the effort." Though this is still about copyright, not about being swamped with PRs.
An otherwise overloaded maintainer of another project may probably be willing to accept individual brilliant contributions from brilliant contributors. Sqlite will not, no matter how brilliant, if the contributor doesn't sign an affidavit. Independent of Sqlite maintainer load.
A known Sqlite contributor who has signed an affidavit, and has a history of good, accepted contributions, may also start spamming trivial contributions that may lead to maintainer overload, and nothing in copyright.html will prevent that.
If they don’t want to do even that, then that’s fine, it’s their choice. But it seems like there’s a reasonable middle ground that’s just being skipped over.
Just not using GitHub would probably solve most of the problems.
Don't have Issues. Don't have PRs. Just push your code to github. Add to the README that this is a mirror of the actual development branch that follows an internal process. The Github repo is only used as a way to publish the latest snapshot of the source.
The "going closed source" because of harassment is just an knee-jerk punitive reactionary response. It's akin to taking your ball and going home.
I suspect it's more about the noise that comes along with it, if it's used by more people than you.
It now doesn't make any sense to someone to go full time open source (and running on donations) and it is completely thankless of your time anyway. AI has now made it far worse for them.
But the most evergreen part of this is, developers will almost certainly never pay for their own tools and will always build their own and then expect to sell it to themselves, which doesn't work.
So we will more close-sourcing which the author has the right to do.
> as long as there are crazy idealists (like me) who put their time into building things for free, and hope that they will make some random persons life a little bit better.
You are only saying this from the perspective of having an employer paying you for everything.
My point is about developers who don't have that and are doing full time "open source" for free which that is not sustainable in the long term. AI will only just make it less worth it for them to maintain open source software as such, unless companies or a substantial amount of other users / developers pay for support.
I have never seen lawyers, mechanics, surgeons and financial advisors ever reduce their profession to free work or advice.
As other have said you can always put your app and source code in a web page or read only repo and call it a day. Some people have been doing just that for decades. You don't even have to publish an email address or a real name.
But oh my, I visited the index page, that is a provocative mouse-cursor effect! I kind of like it!
Dude is probably just tired and needs a break, maybe he comes back, regardless I am thankful for his work and wish him joy in life.
"Just ignore people who reach out to you" and "Just don't get burned out" aren't pointing out an invalid argument, either. It's just peanut gallery nonsense.
Open source software is easy come, easy go. Part of that is accepting it when maintainers don't feel it's worth it anymore. And now with AI you basically have to choose between no contributors or a firehose of slop issues/PRs, something that changed overnight.
The critique is not about the demands for his time as a maintainer, which is what he is addressing, that no one here is complaining about. In fact, post folks have made it clear that they have no issue with it.
Is this performance art?