Open Source as We Know It Is Dead

Open Source became annoying for maintainers, but ironically agentic coding made it awesome for end users. For non-programmers, the benefits of open source used to be mostly indirect and/or theoretical, because they couldn't actually modify the software themselves (learning to program is a major investment of time and effort, and a big barrier when someone just wants to avoid a bug or tweak a feature). But now users can say "Claude, fix it" and it tends to work well enough for a single user.

But every project that leaves [GitHub] takes its issues, its history, and its people somewhere new, with yet another account to make and another place to look. It fractures things even further, and makes the next stranger even less likely to wander in.

I personally have never really used the “discovery” features of GitHub. I’ve maybe found one or two interesting repos by quickly glancing at the profile feed in the past 10 years but most of the time I find things on external sites like this one, or because I’m already on one repo and a comment links me to another. I don’t see those mechanisms of discovery going away, it’s just a link to another domain. The aspect of having to create another account is mildly frustrating but, for me, wouldn’t be a convincing reason to abandon migration off GitHub.

Perhaps that's just where we're heading - smaller, trusted circles, with source available, but contributions by invitation. Maybe that's even fine, and I'm being nostalgic for a version of the Internet that was never going to last.

I love open source and believe in its ability to produce good software. Some classes of software must be open source! I also think that somewhere along the way this idea that all contributions must flow back to the original source became over emphasized, mostly implicitly. The whole point was to enable people to understand and modify the software they depend upon, but there was never a guarantee a maintainer would even look at a contribution. I don’t think the author has a sense of entitlement here, but some people really do and it’s always been an odd dynamic to me. Forking became a non-starter like rewrites. Sometimes those things are necessary and good!

We should foster a sense of collaboration, but ownership and the right to say no is just as important, sometimes more so.

GitHub just made it feel like everyone was finally in the same room.

There are some who believe that this was a bug, not a feature.

I'm thinking of just accepting handmade PRs but if people are considering using an LLM just give me a good spec so I can generate it myself with my design sensibilities