Impact of AI on the Open Source community
tags:
- oss
- open-source
With the recent, and in my opinion sad news of Ladybird closing Ladybird to outside public contributions, it is important to recognize how AI is changing the opensource community and what I understand as opensource.
Opensource for me does not just mean that the source code is legally available online for me to tinker with on my machine. Opensource for me is also many small and big communities around collections of software. This to me is a very important aspect which you might not find that important. To me the broader aspect of community and someone being on the other end of "the wire" is important. You are not simply forking a project and making the changes just for you - that is fine if it does not fit the core mission of the project/maintainer vision/(insert many valid reasons here) - you usually open a Pull Request with the intention of contributing. At least that is my idealist's view of this world. Now, there has always been "drama" in opensource and no (ghosting) or hefty debates around changes (e.g., linux kernel mailing lists), but it never was on what I would call an "industrial level". This does not refer to the level of "drama" but to the level of (potential) disruption of the project/community/maintainer(s). It might have used to be a drama is negatively impacting progress on a project, but it was focused around that and the endurance of the involved individuals. With agents and a few bucks everyone can now dump "something" in front of the project and it is now up to the maintainer/community to figure out whether this is a legit contribution or what many call "slop".
At this point I want to mention: "slop" always existed. I think I have written plenty of code I later regretted writing in a certain way and not every line of a popular opensource project is pristine, good, well written, well tested neither. So I think the current debate should not romanticize the before, which sometimes it seems like it does.
Back to the previous point, it now becomes a social issues where a few or many individuals effectively ruin the inner workings of how the ecosystem functioned. And I think this is a very harmful and dangerous development. Walling off opensource projects means less people will eventually get into it, because how would you get into it, when contributions are closed? It is already a penniless endeavor for most and very much fueled by passion and or personal need.
However, I do not know what a potential solution to this would be, because I think you can do amazing things with LLMs and Agents, they are tools to be used, but they can very quickly produce tons of output and without even judging whether the output is good or not, someone has look at it - because letting other agents review the code is not the solution. Yielding control is not the solution in my opinion.