Closing Canario Terminal source code(rapha.land) |
Closing Canario Terminal source code(rapha.land) |
My only exception to this article is the section, "People underestimate what open source costs from the maintainer side. It’s not just writing code. It’s issues, pull requests, discussions, people demanding things from you for free. I got spammed like crazy. And now with AI, spamming a maintainer is so easy: low effort issues, generated pull requests, and every single one of them takes a bit of your time and energy"
This is all self-inflicted. Don't take Issues. Don't take PRs. Make the repo read-only to everyone but you. There's zero effort, unless you're planning on keeping all the source on your computer and never push it anywhere. Well, I guess, in that case you're saving yourself from doing a push.
So if you don't want to do all that stuff, that's fine. You don't have to. But don't pretend the only alternative is to close the source.
Amiga had the Fish disks, PC had all the whateverware variants during its MS-DOS days.
8 bits naturally had the magazine listings to type in.
"SQLite is open-source, meaning that you can make as many copies of it as you want and do whatever you want with those copies, without limitation. But SQLite is not open-contribution. In order to keep SQLite in the public domain and ensure that the code does not become contaminated with proprietary or licensed content, the project does not accept patches from people who have not submitted an affidavit dedicating their contribution into the public domain."
The more relevant quote is: "In order to keep SQLite completely free and unencumbered by copyright, the project does not accept patches from random people on the internet. There is a process to get a patch accepted, but that process is involved and for smaller changes is not normally worth the effort." Though this is still about copyright, not about being swamped with PRs.
If they don’t want to do even that, then that’s fine, it’s their choice. But it seems like there’s a reasonable middle ground that’s just being skipped over.
Just not using GitHub would probably solve most of the problems.
It now doesn't make any sense to someone to go full time open source (and running on donations) and it is completely thankless of your time anyway. AI has now made it far worse for them.
But the most evergreen part of this is, developers will almost certainly never pay for their own tools and will always build their own and then expect to sell it to themselves, which doesn't work.
So we will more close-sourcing which the author has the right to do.
As other have said you can always put your app and source code in a web page or read only repo and call it a day. Some people have been doing just that for decades. You don't even have to publish an email address or a real name.