Open Source as We Know It Is Dead | Hacker News Reader

Open Source as We Know It Is Dead

jross.me

102 pointsvinhnx64 comments

I could not imagine the pain being being the head of a Libre/Open project nowadays.

It used to suck when there was almost nobody contributing because it felt isolated. Worse was if your project did become popular, you would be managing loads of code AND spending loads of time managing the community than the code.

Nowadays, you probably don't have the community to push back and converse with, just a flood of code with few people you can't actually question it with. So back to isolation but with a million lines of code.

It feels like you would have to have a project with an direct artificial limit to increase the quality of submissions. Like, all submissions must be able to run on a 486 25Mhz and 4MB of RAM, this would keep the code small and manageable. Don't do that, but you get the idea.

> Like, all submissions must be able to run on a 486 25Mhz and 4MB of RAM, this would keep the code small and manageable. Don't do that, but you get the idea.

Why not? It works for Dusk OS!

Dusk OS and Collapse OS, with every global event their reasoning for existing seems much more plausible.

It's why i have 8 different z80 machines (its not, i just like collecting them), so i can prepare for the slopocalypse

> Don't do that, but you get the idea.

Why not? I've been at workplaces where a PR needed to be less than X lines of code without approval from some skip level contributor vouching for it. It's usually an absurdly high limit that you'd realistically never hit in a legacy codebase, but maybe that limit would work fine to filter out massive vibecode PRs.

The goal wasn't to add bureaucracy, but to stop this precise problem: stopping a potentially rushed engineer from pushing in a massive change without oversight. Even large, quality PRs can cause all kinds of long term maintenance issues down the line, so I have no clue why vibecode is getting such grace.

More a case of, maybe shoot a little higher than a 486. Maybe a Pentium 3 so you get SSE in there.

The old hardware approach is still king when it comes to effortlessly catching someone "optimizing" something in a way that will break again in just a few generations of whatever Intel is doing. Unfortunately 486 is now gone from linux upstream (better/worse: all TSC-less or CX8-less cpus are dropped).

I get why project like Linux do that, it allows them to drop some old code and provide optimizations for more modern processors without having to worry about 30 year+ legacy chips, but you do lose something with that.

At least, others usually take up the job and keep it going with a fork.

> Don't do that

I quite like the idea though... I would love to see a real resurgence in retro computing app development that actually brings it all past the "niche of a niche" stage. Even if it's just "make this fast on a XX MHz CPU" and not even targeting a retro OS... embedded could use a lot of extra talent there too.

After all, restrictions are exactly what sparks creativity in people.

I also think the Linux desktop could definitely do with a lot more restriction, which would also help with the decision paralysis people are often faced with.

The paradox of choice in action. Sometimes a limited possibility is better as you can only choose and benefit from a limited amount, but with unlimited choices opportunity losses that can stack indefinitely.

No pain, more fun! Much more interactions, much more reports, much more new features planned for years. Head of dozens of Libre/Open projects.

That's good to hear. Looks like you have a nice sweet spot. Very nice.

> Nowadays, you probably don't have the community to push back and converse with

Why do you think this? People still use open source software and most of them don't immediately turn to a LLM if things aren't working for them, or they want additional features. They have to ask.

What has changed immensely is support. Stack Overflow sites are dead. Forums still get traffic but the impetus to sign up used to be "help me!". LLMs are doing all this work now.

The drive is going remain engaging with people, getting donations, taking about stuff. But I suspect the route into these communities is going to have to evolve.

The last couple of months I've found it easier to just open up the Hermes app on my phone and just tell it to clone a project and build my features into it and then build the app and push it to my phone. 99% of the time I don't bother upstreaming my changes. If it's a project I use regularly I typicallt send the creator $25-50 for all the work they put into the project and for making it open source.

I think this will become commonplace over the next decade, the ability to customize something to your own needs within minutes is immensely powerful once you learn that it's possible to do.

It’s also immensely debilitating on a global scale, as unmaintained local forks proliferate and upstream withers on the vine.

There is also the fact that Maintainers simply don't need contributions any more. This I've noticed also happens at work. Everyone is maintaining their own mini stacks of things. Contribution is up cooperation is down. Why go talk to a colleague when you can talk to Claude? Change is everywhere.

Right, I feel like this is more of the forcing function here rather than generic spam. Open source used to work because operational code was expensive, and it made sense to share. Now, operational code is dirt cheap. Furthermore, you can customize anything to your hearts content now with zero additional effort, so it’s more desirable to make your own solution.

And even if a contribution is helpful (like a feature you hadn’t thought of or a bug you hadn’t encountered) you’re better off writing the change yourself.

This is something that has been a problem for quite some time within the modded-Minecraft community that I'm a part of: it's highly generational, as in, upstreaming is exceptionally rare. Each server is a fork, or a fork of a fork, etc, resulting in lineages of servers like a family tree. It's very typical for multiple servers to encounter the same (or similar) problem(s) and create their own solutions, like convergent evolution.

There was an attempt to start upstreaming changes to a more centralised, ancestor repo, but this failed almost immediately. Why? Well, whoever owns that upstream will naturally want a say in, and thus will exert control over, what gets merged in. The best case scenario is that you create a whole bunch of work for yourself to conform your code whatever arbitrary requirements upstream demands, or; the worst case scenario is that you effectively cede control over what gets run on your server. But this begs the question: why doesn't upstream just pull from downstream? It's all open source, after all, and yet it almost never happens.

It's been a couple years since then and things have only gotten worse: servers are no longer accepting many (if any) community contributions anymore, instead relying on in-house developers. In a sense, these mods are no longer open source, but rather source available: the vast majority of updates come whenever the sole dev-admin has one of their code-binge days.

Anyway, I think something similar is happening here, with open source more generally, particularly with the advent of AI: any outside contribution is just creating work for you; it's probably going to have its idiosyncrasies from its author; features that you wont want to support or spend time tearing out or waiting for them to tear it out; etc. So if you want a feature, you might as well do it yourself, or get an LLM to do it since it'll probably generate something good enough, without complaint, and without much delay.

Thanks for that perspective! I think that dynamic is present in quite a lot of other communities too, especially the ones who have not traditionally embraced open source. You also see it a lot around creative / artsy work where it almost seems to be a faux pas to share anything but the final product. People do recreate things or just are inspired by other work. Coming from open source software it always seemed like wasted potential to me, but that's probably just my bias.

> In a sense, these mods are no longer open source, but rather source available

I understand what sense you mean, but the terms "open source" and "source available" have very clear definitions, and it has nothing to do with accepting contributions or not, only with the license the code is published under. So in a sense only about downstream effects; upstream effects are still a courtesy also with open source.

Cheap development is not equal to cheap maintenance. It is easy to generate the code but verification, acceptance criteria, documentation and maintenance are the real cost.

That's a really good point. It's even happening with non-technical people ... there is an explosion of Claude skills at work.

I feel this deeply... but as an engineer at a big tech company. Over the past decade, I meticulously learned the code base and frameworks, attained readability of various programming languages, etc. I carefully wrote and reviewed code from engineers that took the time to understand what was there and how to make it better or add to it. Carefully crafting comments for feedback every so carefully to not over critique. Over the past 6 months, I have come to realize that world no longer exists. With scores of seemingly high quality code reviews from folks that don't understand what they are contributing to, it's impossible to keep up. I am also not at a place where I can say, I'm making a smaller trusted circle. Many folks in my circle are simply ramping up the quantity of code they want me to review. I simply have to rely more and more on AI to review the code and help me figure out what exactly it does. At the same time, I am also needing to generate more and more code to keep up with the expectations of those around me. We are now instructing our agents to leave comments, having the agents respond to those comments, even long threads where the agents debate technical decisions either both human author and human reviewer almost totally removed from the loop.

We are all getting more and more removed from the profession of writing code. It's like we abstracted away all of the details of writing code and we are spending our days just sending 100 interns on project quests.

I think some will adapt with the times and others will get burned out. This may be the end of open source as we know it, and maybe altogether...

> attained readability of various programming languages

Google eh

> We are now instructing our agents to leave comments, having the agents respond to those comments, even long threads where the agents debate technical decisions either both human author and human reviewer almost totally removed from the loop.

I'm sorry, this is totally ridiculous. Agents can't "debate" or have an opinion any more than your toaster can. They will generate opposing views of whatever you ask them to, regardless of its merit.

I’m starting to think the ones that “adapt” the most are the ones most likely to burn out, as their productivity collapses under the weight of code and related artifacts that neither they nor their “interns” are qualified to understand.

I think the answer is straightforward. You complain that a substantial PR is no longer evidence of good faith. What is evidence? Participation in the community.

I think mailing lists (or an equivalent) are coming back. In a big way.

Goodhart's Law. If community participation becomes a hard requirement we'll see AI agents swamp them too.

Mandatory xkcd: https://xkcd.com/810/

That xkcd is exactly what this thread is about, and so your lazy linkdrop is completely beside the point. The bots are currently posting lots and lots of (often superficially) "constructive and helpful" comments, and it turns to be a complete slog and burnout for humans to figure out whether to press the "constructive" or "not constructive" button.

No, It's pretty obvious when someone is using an LLM to compose their messages

Not so much if the community is private or restricted.

Realistically, a lot of projects simply have a Discord now. If you want to contribute, you have to go participate in that first.

Speaking of everyone setting up their own stack, when's someone gonna do the thing and make self-hosting a Discord clone popular?

There exist several clones, but they all have some drawbacks. Unfortunately few people are willing to tolerate them.

Fluxer.gg is really good and in my opinion, tries to be the most similar alternative to discord in terms of UI/UX so it should "just work"

I highly highly recommend you checking it out, I must say that the first time I used it, I was mind blown that this open source discord alternative actually feels so usable in day-to-day lives.

There are many alternatives to be honest, stoat, matrix,fluxer but fluxer is the alternative I would recommend for public spaces.

The issue now is I think mostly just moving the userbase over to there.

[I have talked to the dev and tried to share it a few times on hackernews as a submission to help get more userbase as I think that HN would definitely love fluxer if it came to know more about it]

(Very slight advertisement but I have tried to build something in this space at https://mirror.forum which can allow a community to have discord,fluxer,matrix,stoat links in the same place for the purposes of discovery of servers in other places than discord and also for the migration of the userbase itself as i think that the problem of an open source solution is mostly solved and this was my attempt at trying to partially help in fixing the moving the userbase issue and making people more familiar with alternatives, though the website mostly has no activity nowadays and I would love activity to happen but I am unsure how to realistically approach so... that's why I am advertising perhaps, I would love to get feedback as well :-D)

I do dislike the fact that they nowadays use Discord though, there are better alternatives like fluxer.gg available, though I do understand that most/some people are already on discord and it has become more normal to create a discord server than other alternatives if one wants to which requires having members which is much easier on discord.

As compared to the friction of another app even though they might be really great, I highly recommend trying out fluxer)

Then also if the developer has already created a discord server, then its hard to slightly migrate the existing users on their discord.

But I am sad about this development though, the community of open source or communities in general moving to discord does feel like moving to a walled garden (one which has increasingly more issues like trying to auto-detect your age and then asking for age-verification and plethora of other issues that a user is exposed to just by using the app which they might be using for the community itself, I really dislike it and I do wish if forums or something better could be used more as compared to discord.)

[Side-note: I built https://mirror.forum which is intended for communities to have both discord/fluxer & also other discord alternatives like stoat/matrix links to eventually help migrate users to these platforms and to help in finding the communities present in these spaces in the first place, I would love some feedback as the website is mostly crickets to be honest]

Discords have been popping up all over too.

This doesn't sound like a barrier to bots

We just banned gen-AI PRs, it seems to be working so far.

Commercial dev is about results and money, and that makes AI almost impossible to resist.

OSS has always been about process. The pleasure is in tinkering with code, collaborating with friends on a fun new idea, and helping people. I don't care about speed.

this could be siloed into complaints about github and pr workflows moreso than being related to FOSS. zero mention of mailing lists or patches, lol

Ahh yes, the fix is to regress to mailing lists...

They kind of did acknowledge this when they said the answer is smaller more trusted circles.

This has been what I look for recently. I prefer projects that are coordinating over discord or similar and have 50-100 total members but with decent activity.

Discord is just as bad imo, bring forums back

different people like different modalities, each project already chooses their own, often several, because they serve different purposes and members

I don't have a strong preference of the medium (heck, I'm biased against centralize communication channels driven by a for-profit company). It's more about the act of needing to participate in a community to vouch that you're there in good faith.

There was a time before programming, hacking, open source, and related communities. These things did not exist even 60 years ago. There will be a time after them, and we’ll move on to something else.

The internet is now a token cache, and we reap those tokens into agents, ethics be damned.

It sounds like part of the problem is that AI tools are machine generated content acting like humans in a comment forum designed for humans. GitHub already has a variety of CI tools which generate huge volumes of machine generated text, and that text is appropriately buries for those that want it without spewing all of it in a developer’s discussion forum.

While it is more challenging to stop genuine imposters, we could also add new features to places like GitHub so that maintainers who do run automated tools can make automated analysis available to PR creators without drowning out human discussion threads. It sounds like part of the problem is that new tools have popped up so fast that we haven’t figured out how to integrate them properly yet.

It's sad when a technology so thoroughly changes what you love. It's life as a human I guess. I hope people like this can still find a way to enjoy themselves, differently. Usually humans do, given time.

Learned from this thread that I can disable PRs from external contributions.

Enabled this feature.

Earlier in the days, PR was better than issue, now, I prefer and issue, as Codex with my guidance can create a much better PR.

> I don't know what the fix is

You said it was dead. How could there be any fix?

Right, the article does seem very, uh, doomery. The author has prematurely spelled the end of open source when we've hardly had time to contend with this.

Better workflow may require contributors to establish the problem and receive agreement before producing large patches, regaardless of whether AI is involved.

Part of me is wondering, maybe it’s time for part of open source to move from code to just words or prose? Since it’s possible to use AI to fix bugs and add features arguably more easily than before, what we could share with each other are ideas, thoughts, additions to each other’s prompts or skills that could be reviewed by the community.

And in this case carefully crafted, clear, and expressive words that are not too verbose would be the contributions of tomorrow.

I keep going back to LLM Wiki. It has found itself in so many other skills because of its fundamental value. Maybe we don’t have as many pull requests. But that one skill has proliferated in so many other skills because of its value.

I dunno. I've been making free software for 3 decades and I still think it's fun. While I do get slop PRs sometimes, it's not frequent. And when I want to land a patch in someone else's project, I haven't really been having difficulty doing so.

The main change for me has been... if I want to send someone a patch, it's more important now to talk to them about it first. But I was doing that anyway. Join the chatroom, let people know I found an issue and am working on fixing it, maybe get their advice on how they think it should be solved (to make sure it fits with their project and goals), and then send code. And stick around to help with testing and stuff. It's not much different than how things were before everything moved to GitHub.

Talk to people. Be a part of the community. That's what made free software work in the past, and it's what makes free software work now. As the article said, it was never just the code.

Yeah, the people aspect is dead or dying. I was having fun over the past few months, putting some AI assisted things I'd always wanted into the world.

Nobody cares anymore, because literally everyone on the planet can literally make their own mini stacks of things, as another commenter just said.

It's sad, but I don't see any way to put the bunny back in the box.

Close those PRs. No hesitation. No remorse.

My project exists for the concrete purpose of helping the community get things done, not for the abstract goal of making good software. (It actually isn't very good software, to be honest.)

If you're a real human being who needs help fixing a bug or implementing a feature, I will gladly take the time to help you. But if you're a bot that is just trying to tidy up my software in accordance with some ideal design pattern, unrelated to the specific needs of any human being, then you can just go help yourself.

Open source projects have had gatekeeping mechanisms for decades. Remember ESR's popular (albeit exaggerated) posts about how to fit in with hacker culture? It's the same thing. There's nothing wrong with it. New contributors must prove that they know how to be a good member of any community they're trying to enter. There's no abstract ideal of openness-to-all that we must somehow all strive for. Follow the needs of the actual community that you care about. Don't feel sorry for spammers, especially non-human spammers.

I'm customarily adding a "LLM disclosure: no LLM was used while drafting this issue text" to issues now (when that is true), to at least give some explicit signal that two humans are talking. Of course the text you write yourself is often distinct from slop grenades, but emphasizing that can't hurt.

And of course, you can write that and still paste completely slop, but nobody seems to be doing that yet, and if they would it's probably not convincing.

I personally find it better than ever, even with the current issues outlined in the post. We'll work through them, the linux kernel team has, the rest of us can too. But never has been easier to work on or hack up unfamiliar projects to learn from, build on, and extend. Many projects have more refined features with fewer bugs. It's not all bad stuff happening.

One has to hope that this is mostly just the "uncanny valley" of AI as it climbs up the ladder of general intelligence.

At some point I think AI technology available to us will be advanced enough that "slop" is largely a thing of the past. Some of the issues here will still remain, but hopefully at that point a PR review could be largely automated, in a trustworthy way.

> It was the people. It was fixing a typo in a README and having someone say thanks. It was a stranger on the other side of the world finding a bug in my code and sending a fix before I'd even woken up.

All of this still happens in a world where people aren’t typing the individual code lines by hand.

You just have to adjust and move on. Don’t let your code quality decrease, fight off those that submit vibe coded bullshit and push forward. You’ll find there’s people still behind the prompts.

It’s not totally equivalent but there was a time where all programmers wrote assembly or the like. They’d look at JavaScript with disdain if they saw it in their day. Yet people kinda just.. moved on.

open source as the name suggests has never been unambiguously about open contribution. It's the code that's open, not the automatically the community that builds it. SQLite is sometimes brought up for its idiosyncratic developer code of conduct. Openness especially of very popular software with high reliability requirements has usually been on the user side.

I'm not too surprised by the recent problems but I see them as intensifications, not a new problem. As development platforms became larger, low quality contributors and people who wanted something on their CV became more and more common. That there's never been any kind of trust system makes these issues inevitable.

Well written & relatable.

At first i thought it was going to be a pure counter-AI rant, but no, the author admits using AI everyday in a variety of ways.

Another argument, maybe OSS of smaller packages is on its way out as we get to generate whatever is needed on the fly?

Ah, is it September[0] again already? Yes, our fun little clubs get popular, and the posers move in, and they're cheating or, well, they're not really cheating per se, but they're just no fun to play with, and they seem to be having fun without us, so we're going to take our ball and go home.

I can't really blame anyone involved in either side of the equation--Sindre Sorhus doesn't blame AI, and OP doesn't blame maintainers--this is just the natural evolution of.. everything! That which does not go extinct... evolves.

Or is it the other way around?

Doula your grief.

0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September

1. https://www.viruscomix.com/page583.html

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