We're about to waltz into a deep period of tension between developers, and people who, empowered by multimillion dollars corporations, bravely violate developers' copyrights in the hopes of replacing their jobs, while bullying these same developers who dare express their discontent.

This is not gonna end well.

"Sorry folks, this issue was more of a joke (am I allowed to do that?) but I'll keep the issue open since there's some discussion here."

I'd believe it was a joke if was a one-liner but this has far more detail then that.

this issue was more of a joke (am I allowed to do that?)

Not really a fan of the qualification here to possibly scare people off from calling them out either.

To clear, I have no problem with them hiding the repo, I have no problem with them changing their mind after the blowback, but it's frustrating when they can't own these decisions and try to hide behind it being a "joke".

simonw correctly describes it as "not technically open source" - though OSI doesn't have the trademark, the term open source, capitalized or not, refers to the what the Open Source Definition codifies. There are other terms such as shared source, for this sort of stuff.

In addition to his great sense of humor, Steve is usually ahead of the curve in terms of trends. There's a lesson in this. LLMs have become incredible constraint solvers ("SAT-solvers for code"). Well-thought-out tests, types, specs, and docs are all incredibly valuable constraints. This has big implications - for example what happens to licenses when you can cheaply rewrite the codebase and therefore unencumber it.

The performative closing of public contributions citing the slop scare felt disingenuous from the start. You couldn't be bothered to implement _any_ mitigations that leave the community engaged with the project?

Writing a contributor karma bot, moving to a non-social or obscure git forge (most slop contributors are resume farming and GitHub is the only forge the HR cares about), newbie-unfriendly non-public workflows like git send-mail, or references from Discord... This isn't an AGI on the other side of the screen, planning the perfect strategy to infiltrate your project; it's a sub-script-kiddie trying to fill a portfolio with quick "contributions" doing the more annoying version of "fixing typos" in docs.