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points by 999900000999 10 hours ago | 0 comments

I’ve found trying to contribute to FOSS to have all the stress of work with none of the pay.

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!

[–] flpm 10 hours ago

I had the same experience until I found the right project. And the post resonates a lot. Egos and politics are not fun. In some projects people are just fighting for power, it's not about community nor code. Keep looking, don't give up!

[–] samudrijan 4 hours ago

Which music hardware is open these days? Thought I saw some oktatrak updates.

[–] 999900000999 3 hours ago

The FM1 is 60$ and you can buy it now. Here’s the site with custom firmware

https://thefirmwarehub.com/

The Behringer Kick was just announced with custom firmware being its main feature

https://tech.yahoo.com/audio/articles/behringer-kick-sampler...

[–] palata 10 hours ago

You should not contribute if you don't find it worth it. There are many reasons to contribute. Maybe it's easier for you if your patch gets upstream instead of maintaining a fork, maybe you want to be part of a community, maybe something else.

I don't know if it's good for your CV. I have done a ton of open source before AI was a thing, and the truth is that nobody cares. I still have the basic coding test in interviews, even if the team interviewing me is actually relying on my open source work in their project.

And AI making it easier to contribute to a project, I think it's even less valuable today. Do it if you want to, that's all!

[–] jongjong 6 hours ago

Yes and anyway, open source is immoral now because your free work will be absorbed by corporations using AI and weaponized to suppress fellow independent software developers who have to compete against the AI and the corporate-controlled 'open' project; driving down the value of human labor in the process and further entrenching monopolies.

You're not helping fellow developers by giving them tools to 'make their lives easier' anymore; now you're helping people who don't care about software at all and just want to make a quick buck to monopolize the industry using your free labor.

And anyway, the whole market is monopolized at the attention layer now. The only people whose software is going to make any money are suits with business connections; not independent folks. Literally the people who contributed the least to the open source movement will make the most money.

It is the greatest theft of intellectual labor in the history of mankind. It steals not only from the contributors who are conned into working for free, but from their peers through centralization and deprivation of opportunities.