Honestly I think we're going to see a lot less AI-written code in the future, and more AI-assistance (PR reviews, documentation, security scans, scaffolding, brainstorming, test suites, etc). Example: to ship one feature for my open source project with a collaborator, we went back and forth for a month to agree on the change, test it, approve it, merge it. The code was pretty tiny. We could get more contributions faster if AI can help us tighten up that lifecycle.
Open source is one of those weird things where your hobby project can become an essential piece of infrastructure.
It's like if you loved crocheting, but somehow if you stopped crocheting everyone in your city would no longer have clothes and need to walk around naked.
If you’re at Google and invent Kubernetes you might still capture 0.000001% (probably less) of the economic value created by Kubernetes, but you probably enjoy very generous comp.
OSS doesn’t have any of that, besides being extremely in demand as a consultant or whatever.
Not necessarily. AI has significantly reduced the marketability of that angle, when people can just ask AI about your OSS project.
That is to say, it's only getting more lopsided.
We definitely do not pay enough for the utility we get from OSS. But on the other hand do we want do copyright in code? Also when you pay for something you can hold liable the vendor if things go south (security holes etc). Do we want the devs of OSS to be in such position?
i can tell - it looks like the blog post doesn't really add anything over a direct transcript of the call itself. it's just a bland summary of the really interesting story Dalton told
* I was burned out from work politics at the same time, and had to prioritize fighting those work politics since that's what was paying me. By the end of each day at that company, I didn't feel like staring at a screen any more
* I would get a flurry of poorly-tested pull requests that would break it for some users
* I got lots of suggestions of <feature to implement> which weren't well thought out for how to generalize
* No actually good engineer stepped up to say "I want to help with this"
* There was a commercial alternative that had gotten funding and they were better at marketing
Instead of talking about concrete misbehavior by concrete individuals or institutions, "oh that poor guy is suffering from foss burnout" is thrown in, and instantly, any thought or action that might change anything about the situation is stopped and discarded.
It depersonalizes a problem that is _very_ personal. Diffusing responsibility to no one, while at the same time reframing valid logical callouts as emotionally driven nonsense that can be ignored.
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In essence, "FOSS Burnout" is this hybrid between victim blaming and blaming the universe, while in reality it's a real person at that very moment doing something unethical to another human being.
We need to stop talking about useless higher-level concepts and start talking about concrete bad behavior that could be instantly stopped.
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If you've read "it diffuses responsibility to no one" and thought "oh, hey! corporate! Asscovering!", then yes. You got it. That's why this trope keeps coming up.
It's no grassroots thing. It's engineered to keep the meat grinder running. Nothing else.
And the worst part is that it shows up even without corporate involvement, because it seeped into the defaults people apply without thinking.
We wrote about it: https://tritium.legal/blog/desktop
Honestly, I don't know if open source works outside of a few massive projects any more.
I agree. But in the current state of OSS, if you AGPL something, someone else will re-slopfactor into MIT and take the credit, while being glorified for providing a more "open" alternative.
Or they just ask the AI to port your AGPL code into their proprietary codebase and not tell anyone.
Enforcement of license violations in the age of AI needs a 180.
The guy the city hired every year had a mob in front of his door. People's letters to the authorities got no answer, so suddenly he apparently became their contact person. I was buying snacks in a nearby shop. I went out when I heard people shouting. They were shouting accusations at a guy who must have just appeared before his door because he was wearing pajamas in that cold weather.
"You Islamists will ruin this country! [0]
Happy with what you did? My children actually cried!"
and so on.
He calmly answered: "This is something I did on my own. This year I got a cancer diagnosis, so I didn't have the motivation. Sorry!"
Him feeling the need to apologize always comes to my mind when I see the toxic comments on their unpaid work that the open source maintainers feel that they need to respond to.
[0]: Well, they did ruin the country. But that's another story.
Plus code for the park: 326F+73J Beşiktaş, İstanbul, Türkiye
- People asking for and always expecting new patterns and colors.
- Raise hell if you miss a few superficial stitches and demand immediate patch work.
- No exit path without complaints. If you find it unsustainable and ask for help with the cost of materials for the *next* batch while the current batch is still out there and works fine, you are blamed for (literal) rug pulling.
asim•1h ago
https://go-micro.dev/blog/27
reactordev•1h ago