The graying open source community needs fresh blood
The graying open source community needs fresh blood
Deep experience of the older tech crowd is nothing short of vital, yet projects need new devs to move forward
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I feel like there's maybe also a bit of disappointment in open-source going around? The last few years have shown that it's not the silver bullet, it was thought to be.
Companies will find ways to relicense contributions via CLAs, or to just straight up violate your copyright with GenAI. And even projects that technically tick all the open-source boxes, like Chromium and parts of Android, can and do exert plenty control over users, because no one has the manpower to fork them.
Then there's plenty unethical companies making use of open-source, and they rarely contribute back to make up for it.
Nevermind that the open-source infrastructure is owned by corporations (GitHub, Discord etc.).And it feels ever more present to me that publishing things as open-source means maintenance work, which can quickly lead to burnout. People just expect you to provide updates, no matter what your license text says.
Like, I certainly don't either think that not doing open-source is any closer to a solution. But I'm finally at a point where I feel like my code is useful and good enough to publish, and it just feels like either my only 'users' are corporations scraping my code, or if I promote it, then it's just a ton of maintenance work waiting for me.
I don't know, maybe that's also just a me-problem...And it feels ever more present to me that publishing things as open-source means maintenance work, which can quickly lead to burnout. People just expect you to provide updates, no matter what your license text says.
David Beazley, big in the python world and one of the OGs of the python ecosystem from back in the 90s, kinda had a moment about this a couple of years ago.
He has or had a few somewhat popular libraries and liked to write things and put them out there. But, IIRC, got fed up of the consumeristic culture that had taken over open source.
I think he put it along the lines of "The kind of open source I'm into is the 'here's a cool thing I made, feel free to use it however you want' kind" ... and didn't have positive things to say about the whole "every open source author is now a brand and vendor" thing.
The result of which, IIRC, was him archiving all of his libraries on GitHub. From a distance, it also seemed like he felt burnt out from a hacking culture in which he no longer felt like he belonged.
As a great comedian once said, "If you work in advertising or marketing, kill yourself. (...) You are the ruiner of all things good. (...) You are fucked and you are fucking us. Kill yourself."
It's only too bad the seeds didn't take root.
Nobody has been able to adequately explain how ai is violating any oss licenses.
You are explicitly allowed to read the source code.
When I read code under GPL source and write something like that under a different license, I'm legally liable for copyright infringement. Of course the original owners need to prove it first, but still there's problems from that.
Some open source projects outright disallow you from contribution if you tell them you're working on a closed source competitor.
When I read code under GPL source and write something like that under a different license, I'm legally liable for copyright infringement. Of course the original owners need to prove it first, but still there's problems from that.
Neat. But if you create your own version based off what you read that's fine. You can't copy it, but you can learn from it.
I can read the Linux source code and use it to create my own compatible kernel.
Some open source projects outright disallow you from contribution if you tell them you're working on a closed source competitor.
So? They can refuse submissions to their code but they couldn't stop you from using what you see to create your own product.
Really not sure what you’re getting at here.