Everyone thinks AI vs non-AI is a debate but just like all of those, it’ll be meaningless to the engineers of tomorrow.

I’ll jam with my friends, make a game in a weekend, but I have no interest in dealing with the egos of big FOSS projects.

However, I am seeing vibe coding create a new type of community. In the music space you have tons of people vibe coding new OSes for music hardware.

Akai has even promised to officially support custom firmware on the MPC Sample Keys! Custom firmware has existed for decades, but maybe a tiny handful of people could make it. Now just about everyone can!

If I keep my code proprietary, you are beholden to the shape of the community I dictate.

The license is first, it precedes, any notion about community.

As a user, I like it when I own the devices I buy and can install and modify the software I want. That's not always the way it is, and that's life. I won't go to other projects and tell them that they must change something because I want them to.

Im sympathetic to the perspective in some ways but I think it's wildly impractical to actually try to keep AI out of software development.

I suppose an anti-ai optimist might hope for a future where AI written software proves too problematic over time and things return to their ideal vision of no AI in most software.

I really, really dont think that's in the range of possibilities. So what would be left?

- pockets of anti ai software

- these people slowly disappear or the window moves ("ai in software BUT ...")

- ai use is completely and thoroughly normalized

I didn't particularly want the ugly app, but it is implemented in GadgetBridge[1], which is on codeberg.

That's an Android app, but I wanted a MacOS version.

I LLM-reverse engineered the API based on the GadgetBridge work and now have a MacOS version, specific for my device. As part of that I worked out how to do temperature monitoring (which GadgetBridge doesn't support). Normally I'd contribute that back, but codeberg has been very explicit on their policy of no-LLM work, so I guess I won't do that.

So much for community.

[1] https://codeberg.org/Freeyourgadget/Gadgetbridge

But open-source software is far more about the process than the product. And therefore longevity of resulting software can be expected to be far greater. Foundations of our software stack - libraries, source control operating systems, compilers, databases and numerous other pieces require people capable and willing to do a long-term care of the software - hence, the community that need to last decades. Linux and PostgreSQL is 35 years old, git is 21, OpenSSL 28.

I believe human-only software development will remain for the foreseeable future, despite the growth of LLM-based ones, just like mass-produced grocery bread didn't displace the artisanal bakeries.

They matter rather less if the goal is to have useful software.

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There's also the possibility that you make something commercially valuable, and forbid corporations from deriving value from it; in which case you'll suddenly have to share space with something that's (somewhat?) interoperable and outside your control. As was seen in the news a few times when project owners got annoyed at cloud providers and tried to restrict them.

If you want a project to be community driven, adding an agreement that empowers its leaders to punish and exclude any community member for any reason, including reasons that have nothing to do with the project itself, is the opposite of that.

Codes of conduct result in dictator-driven projects, not community-driven projects.

You need to build a thing first. Community doesn't matter if you don't have cool software. License doesn't matter if you don't have cool software. I'm seeing people forget this principle a lot recently.

The best thing you can do to promote free software is to make good free software. I was recently invited to sign a European digital sovereignty petition (which I am not eligible to sign). Know what helps much more with that? Making European digital sovereign systems. Instead of petitioning the government to switch MS Office to LibreOffice someone would have to actually put in the effort to find out why the government doesn't use LibreOffice, and fix that. (It's probably not because it doesn't run on their computers!)

You have to use copyleft licenses or else the software quickly becomes unfree, if it's actually worth anything. This doesn't happen to most non-copyleft free software because it's not worth very much, not because it doesn't happen.

A community of users doesn't have much value. Any forum or Discord guild or mailing list is secondary to the actual software and it actually being used. Plenty of successful software has no "community" - sudo, for example. Plenty of software with a "community" is not successful. Some software is successful and has a community, like Blender.

A community of developers is only valuable if they're doing valuable things. The Fediverse chat group that shared the link to the European digital sovereignty petition - no useful Fediverse software seems to be coming out of the people in that group. It's all about ivory-tower protocols that won't possibly work in the real world, and stuff like that. No actually working software.

We also have to stop over-estimating the worth of free software just because it's free. Good free software is good software which is also free software. No software is bad, bad software is also bad. Some random code you wrote and published somewhere on the internet usually isn't very useful, and that's probably why it doesn't have a community. Don't try to create a community first - that won't make the software any better. You have to make good software, that can spread by word of mouth, first and then you can have a community after that. Think about the number of random little programs on the internet, now think how many are installed on your computer - not a very big percentage, but the ones that you do have installed, many people have installed. Those are the useful ones.

In most projects the original creators remain the main developers no matter how many other contributors join. Late contributors having a significant effect on a project is the exception, not the rule, and when it happens it's actually an undesirable power inversion since the original creator retains unearned influence - see the PolyMC incident. There is no way to become the chief developer of a project other than having created it. If you think you can rewrite the whole thing and make it better, don't "join the community" - make a fork (which makes you part of the community, but that is not the main goal!).

If you're actually doing the majority of the work, offering a dual license is not unethical. We are forced to live in capitalism whether we like it or not, and we should be trying to squeeze money out of capitalist entities - lord knows they're good at squeezing money out of us. To not play that game is to lose by default. This isn't incompatible with being nice to people who are not money-squeezers, if you dual-license. A community fork can legally continue as AGPL-only. (You don't necessarily need a full CLA either, you just need people to agree their code will be in your commercial version. Programmers treat licenses and CLAs like satisfying the borrow checker, but that's not how they actually work.)

In enough cases, I'm sure many of us can think of some, some of the relatively recent "community" stuff has been counter-productive to an open source project, abused as an opportunity to enforce on clueless bystanders whatever fad orthodoxy of the day, or in the worst cases campaign viciously against specific demographics under the banner of doing the opposite.

Talented engineers who just want to do an open source project don't want any of that.

Separate from all that, I'm 100% with no Discord and no GitHub, both of those are total cancer.

developer communities can also be valuable but i think increasingly people are finding they can be quite toxic. the chillest communities i've found have actually been ones primarily made up of non-devs vibecoding. no egos, no endless arguments, holy war battles, or bikeshedding. they just build stuff and share. it's kind of nice acutally.

This is not true. I've never heard of a 'working class' person getting sued for copyright infringement. People who run a business to make money from copyright infringement are not working class and those few small timers who are infringing among family and friends would never be pursued; there is a 'fair use' clause after all in the US and the issue is re-distribution, not consumption.

The problem is not that copyright protects the powerful, it's that copyright is not enforced to protect you if you're not powerful. As is the case with AI. The problem is lack of enforcement so the idea that copyrights oppresses the working class is completely backwards.

I'm an open source developer myself. One of my projects has about 6k stars on GitHub. Open source is dead. It was never 'open' anyway because it was always the big corporate-sponsored projects which got all of the attention.

Frankly, open source is immoral at this stage. Just a con to convince gullible fools to give away their time for free for AI to use. Given the new reality, author is essentially unwittingly trying to steal people's time.

I'm not saying this as an insult. I do consider my past self to be a gullible fool, even before AI, though you have to recognize that I was a lesser kind of fool. Now the exact mechanism of theft of your labor is right there in front of your eyes! What a fool you have to be to write open source code now!

There are other ways to make code 'source available' where people can pay a contribution to use the code or participate and can become shareholders of a shared venture or member of a club. Paying contributors is the only moral approach. It's satanic that open source folks have flipped this basic, obvious moral reality on its head and it reveals deeply distorted personal values or a deep misunderstanding of how society functions and a deep hypocrisy around the role of money in people's lives and how it affects their ability to form groups. Many played right into the hands of the people they claim to oppose.

I wonder how people work with omarchyslop (the linux distribution spam-slopped by DHH). Do they have any real community outside of paid fanboi accounts? If so, how do they interact? I feel that there is no real exchange of e. g. code since claude slop just autogenerates that. It must be strange for them.

Unless you use AI.

Same people, same mute message; every time, with no delay. "Accept me, then I'll see if I want to accept you".

Fuck off.