But “open source” doesn’t mean you have to accept PRs or deal with other people, right? Can’t the source just be hosted somewhere with no PRs or issues or comments or anything?

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.

He has a right to do anything he wants with hit source, but Open Source is nothing more than a license. We had GPL 2 before there was github. All you had to do is either deliver the source with your software, or make the source available upon request, even if it's by snail-mail.

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.

I think the SQLite model of contribution "Open-Source, not Open-Contribution" is a good middle ground to keep maintainer's sanity while having the code open [1]:

"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."

[1]: https://sqlite.org/copyright.html

The author highlights exactly what is wrong with doing "Open source" or "Build in public" in 2026.

It now doesn't make any sense to go full time on 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.