I've got mixed feelings.
"A little copying is better than a little dependency" becomes much easier to fulfil with AI, in a literal sense, and I support a lot of "little dependencies"
Ask HN: Do you think differently about working on open source these days?
21–30 of 63 posts
Re: Ask HN: Do you think differently about working on open source these days?
#22Me I open source less and 100% keep off github all new code unless it's for pay for a client who wants to use github.
Re: Ask HN: Do you think differently about working on open source these days?
#23It's impossible to develop open source software without having a credit/debit card and cell phone present. Feels more like a scam to me than not but I understand it from an operator's perspective; you have to prevent fraud. From a contributor's perspective who had their life derailed for more than a year, it's a pain to get everything back up and running as it was before.
I don't think I needed a credit card or cell phone to register with codeberg. I did need an email address.
In theory if we wanted to be very inclusive we could do things based on web of trust or P2P tech or in-person sneakernet. It'd be fun, but it'd be slow.
Re: Ask HN: Do you think differently about working on open source these days?
#24Open Source is one of the most humanistic, progress driving cultures people have ever come up with.
I mean I am fucking shocked that people don't get this, our whole fucking modern world, all the parts that make stuff work, every last bit of it is built on top of or dependent on OSS.
There isn't a single lab, company, person or country that doesn't use and benefit from open source. Whether they know it or not.
It is what has supported widespread fractal improvement starting at the individual level. It's the greatest grassroots story movement ever and it's still driven by grassroot adoption.
It's like programatic peer review writ large with no gate keeping journals and its changed humanity forever, if we ever deflect that asteroid headed towards earth or if we make it to the stars, or if we figure out how to avoid the heat death, it's because open source got us there.
Re: Ask HN: Do you think differently about working on open source these days?
#25It's impossible to develop open source software without having a credit/debit card and cell phone present. Feels more like a scam to me than not but I understand it from an operator's perspective; you have to prevent fraud. From a contributor's perspective who had their life derailed for more than a year, it's a pain to get everything back up and running as it was before.
I don't think I needed a credit card or cell phone to register with codeberg. I did need an email address. In theory if we wanted to be very inclusive we could do things based on web of trust or P2P tech or in-person sneakernet. It'd be fun, but it'd be slow.
I'm writing this from a DevOps perspective. I suppose branding all OSS as "impossible to develop without credit/debit card and cell phone" isn't in good taste on my part from a more generalized perspective.
Re: Ask HN: Do you think differently about working on open source these days?
#26Long before LLMs, I had code on github as a portfolio, none of it was licensed to be copied or modified. People still forked my code.
Re: Ask HN: Do you think differently about working on open source these days?
#27Without my open source projects, my career would not have taken off. Simple as that.
Re: Ask HN: Do you think differently about working on open source these days?
#28I owe my entire 20 year career to open source, so if anything, I plan to increase the number of contributions I make as time goes on; it's one of the few areas in life where I feel indebted.
Same
Re: Ask HN: Do you think differently about working on open source these days?
#29An oft overlooked part of being involved in open source is the networking and mentorship, both technical and personal. Being a part of one or more well run projects lets you interact with some incredibly smart people discussing technical topics well outside your day job. Not all of that will pan out to something directly useful, but over time it adds up to both a wider skillset at actual development and dealing with a distributed team. The evolution of your written communication skills alone are probably worth it.
Re: Ask HN: Do you think differently about working on open source these days?
#30Specifically I'm looking for licenses that bar loading the code into LLMs. Github is feeding open source code into Copilot and selling it to people and they need to be stopped.