He who does not code, neither shall he eat
4 points by gmem
4 points by gmem
it's pretty rambly and there isn't really a clear thesis to this article. What are we supposed to actually take away from this piece?
My takeaway is that the author sees a new social standard for Open Source software rising up, that rather than "this is for everyone", it's becoming "this is for everyone who can lend a hand (in myriad ways)". Utility to anyone else is incidental at best, and if you try to be a Demanding Customer because you use the open source without lending an actual hand to it, you'll be told to bug off.
I don't know that I've -seen- this happening explicitly yet, but it certainly reflects a lot of how I think I'd want to approach my open source work, small as it might be atm.
Increasingly, the alternative is simply to not publish your source code at all, except to a small group of friends, or your employer.
It seems like “everyone” started to get really loud in the last two years or so.
Partly, we’ve been telling people that their GitHub profile is the key to getting noticed by employers. People who previously had never put the effort into learning enough about a specific project to meaningfully contribute can now do “Hey Claude, have a look at the open issue list on this project and pick one that seems reasonable to tackle.”, maybe provide a little bit of feedback, and put together a maybe-good-maybe-super-sloppy PR that may or may not solve the problem and may or may not solve the problem well. Security research and CVEs seem to be moving the same direction; the curl project, as an example, basically said “this is so exhausting, we’re taking July 2026 off and won’t be reading any security reports until August”. Getting your name on a CVE is baller and gets you street cred; can you imagine the street cred you’ll get if you have your name on a Curl CVE?! And Codex will just straight up let you do that, or if you really need… DeepSeek will probably work if you hit the Codex guardrails.
On the other hand, it feels like, as you mention, “Demanding Customers” have started demanding a lot more from open source for whatever reason. And not just in a feature/bugfix sense, but also in search of a community where they feel at home. It feels like these communities of non-developers (maybe users) are sometimes popping in spite of the developers’ non-desire to build a big community. Big communities need moderation and conflict resolution to some degree, which adds more loud overhead…
If open source developers are starting to shut down and retreat a bit, I don’t blame them one bit, especially for the ones who do it for free instead of e.g. getting paid to work on it as part of their job. I could plausibly see myself working on open source projects as a labour of love again in the future; there is no timeline where I want to be settling fights or arbitrating conflicts on Discord between users of my software.
I have a few public repos and I see them the same way - this is basically a code dump and if it works for anyone else, that's a bonus. I have no interest in worrying about compatibility or support for code that I'm writing for fun in my free time.