this post was submitted on 15 Jul 2024
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[–] Ephera@lemmy.ml 28 points 4 months ago (1 children)

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...

[–] maegul@lemmy.ml 38 points 4 months ago (2 children)

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.