Isolating up is the opposite of interesting to me.

What's clear is they mediating all selection choice and interest through pressure points of a single fixed trust board is of limited use going forward. I don't think the vouches and other web of trusts tackle the actual root need to disaggregate, decentralize.

You can anti-social open source, reject, flee to nihil and going away, solo-ing. I think that's mad bad and dumb; just my judgement call. I agree strongly with v-it, open source is social. It's interesting and fascinating to open your mind. These other signals are fascinating. The glut of goodness is something we should firehose better, not shy from. https://v-it.org/

The CoC crowd are there to only instigate trouble.

Greybeard here... let me start by saying I like the cut of the author's jib. I'm old enough to have sat before the elders of the arpanet when there were on,y 1's and they had to forge about half of them into 0's manually. Another thing about the old ways of making software is projects were often written or maintained by one or two people at a time. The intarwebs at large had their email addresses and mailed them bug reports directly. Some projects got discussed by the community on IRC or mailing lists. People were generally professional and if they weren't they were deleted from the mailing list or added to people's block files on iirc and pine.

But my point is... the active dev group was, at any time, very small. Mostly I'm talking about small utilities like make, Sendmail, sed, awk, sed. Perl seemed like it was just Larry Wall and tchrist for most of the time before 1990. gcc was an insane counter-example with a cast of thousands who submitted patches and you had to socialize your patch w/ RMS if you wanted it upstream.

oh wait... I forgot to make my point... My point is... the new tools support larger teams of people constantly interacting. I think there are great benefits to having a small team and effectively giving the middle finger to internet randos who don't submit their patches on one of their kidneys (i.e. - they'll think long and hard and sure as he'll won't submit two.) But getting people interested in your work output isn't one of those benefits. So... absolutely... go old school... But keep in mind the size of your team will be small and it may be hard to attract users.

But... screw users... I write software to support my own use cases. I open source it on the off chance someone else may find it useful.

Yep!

To be more specific, Open Source only promises the four fundamental freedoms (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Free_Software_Definition).

It promises literally NOTHING else, including zero cost. Free and open source software can and should cost money! (The "free" in "free and open source" is not about money, people!)

I'm actually very enthusiastic about these OSS "supply chain" attacks that have been happening in various communities. Because optimistically I hope it'll help people realize that OSS _is not a supply chain_ (more details here: https://lobste.rs/s/cxwidw/no_one_owes_you_supply_chain_secu...). Unless you're paying your vendor AND/OR have a contract in place with them with certain guarantees, you do not have a supply chain.

One term thats in almost every FOSS license is "this software is provided with no warranty." A supply chain implies a warranty. Therefore, FOSS is not a supply chain.

Even the most closed community will often accept a contribution if you are polite and email them.

An open source developer had disabled pull requests and other operations on their repository because they were fed up with harassment. They gained a reputation for being extremely disagreeable at that time. I was unaware of this and simply assumed that was how the project worked. I had to do some minor investigative work to find their email address and I sent them a polite, low pressure email with my unsolicited patch and made it clear it was fine to use it or ignore it. They thanked me, explained the situation, even apologized for the difficulty, and said locking things down was the only way they knew to cope with the situation, and of course applied the fix.

Why anyone gave CoCs and their adherents the time of day over the past decade will always be a mystery to me. We should have pointed, laughed, and banned them. Instead, large projects and corporations dove headfirst into CoCs and grievance politics, openly inviting woke/DEI/leftist entryists in. Looking back I think it was a COVID and ZIRP fever dream. The reversal upon Trump's second presidency goes to show how performative it was.

I agree, and add:

You don't need to put up a marketing page that tries to convince people to use your software. Instead (or as well), consider explaining all the reasons why someone should not use your software. More users, more problems.