Don't put words in my ~mouth~ (keyboard) that I didn't ~say~ (type), I'm not saying I want my contributions to be accepted on equal footing even if they are generated by AI. What I'm saying is that solving this problem this way is going to make opensource much worse. We need a better way, and I'm not sure which is the better way, sorry.
You aren't really contributing anything except funding to Anthropic/oai/MS/etc if you're sending genAI content. The better way will be fairly similar to the previous status quo: humans interacting with humans, with the change that there will be higher barriers to gaining access to the web of trust.
> You aren't really contributing anything except funding to Anthropic/oai/MS/etc if you're sending genAI content.
Why people keep saying that I'm advocating for AI use? I'm not happy with the decision of Ladybird maintainers, but that doesn't mean I'm willing to spam them with AI slop.
Don't put words in my ~mouth~ (keyboard) that I didn't ~say~ (type), I'm not saying I want my contributions to be accepted on equal footing even if they are generated by AI. What I'm saying is that solving this problem this way is going to make opensource much worse. We need a better way, and I'm not sure which is the better way, sorry.
Opensource is already much worse and is drowning in slop. Until a better way is found (if it can be found), severely restricting contributions is the only sane response. And it has nothing to do with the perceived "only influential people can do it". You're always welcome to fork any and all projects and run your AI on those
> You're always welcome to fork any and all projects and run your AI on those
You can still tell them how you did it, just not in the form of code/patches. You should be able to describe it in prose so that the maintainer understands your solution approach.
Not necessarily. I just fixed the Ladybird build process so it will successfully build on a system that uses musl instead of glibc. By far the most compact way of explaining what needed to be changed is to share the changes themselves. It is a set of very small changes to a number of individual files.
That sounds more like a new feature than a bugfix, however. That aside, I didn’t claim that it would necessarily be more compact, just that it’s possible. Any change can be described in prose, to whatever level is necessary to get the essential insights across. It’s how the ancient greeks did mathematics, they didn’t have symbols or formulas.
Are they going to be using gerrit or a private repo and push changes back regularly? Sometimes the discussions on PRs are equally valuable to see how a commit was arrived at, and I'd be sad if that got lost in this change.
It sounds like all public contribution will simply be impossible. That said, they will continue to develop out in the open on GitHub and you can clone the repo and build whenever you want. You can continue to contribute in other ways.
I hate this change and agree with your PR comment. This change makes me sad as well.
My hope is that public contributions can resume in the future. Part of their justification for this step is that they are trying to stabalize the project to produce a stable public alpha. Fair enough. And many Open Source projects have begun to voice concerns over the burden that the massive increase in contributions is causing, often from AI. Linus Torvalds has certainly been flagging this. The Open Source world in general is going to have to navigate this and come to a solution that works without the entire Open Source ecosystem becoming read only.
Once Ladybird ships a "stable" browser out to the world, I am hoping they can adopt whatever the "best practice" for Open Source has become to be able to accept public participation again.
> Now opensource will become a thing that only "influential" people can contribute to. No. Having access to a slop generator doesn't entitle you to acceptance to any and all open source projects. You're still responsible for the quality of your contributions. Something that is completely lost on bullshit artists.
Don't put words in my ~mouth~ (keyboard) that I didn't ~say~ (type), I'm not saying I want my contributions to be accepted on equal footing even if they are generated by AI. What I'm saying is that solving this problem this way is going to make opensource much worse. We need a better way, and I'm not sure which is the better way, sorry.
Your prior message could be taken that this was an elitist move, and not a move that is being taken by many different projects for survival with limited review capacity.
LLMs in general change the balance of how much effort generating content takes, sometimes by orders of magnitude. They unfortunately do not significantly change how much effort it takes to understand and evaluate the quality of that content. The result is that the base value of a piece of content (including code) is plummeting.
> Whether code was typed by hand is beside the point. What matters is who is responsible for it once it enters the browser. Ladybird is becoming a browser for real users. The people introducing changes to it must be the people who decide those changes belong in the project, and who will answer for the consequences. It probably accelerated the decision, but I don't think that's all of it. I think they're moving in the…
It's still open source, but not open for public contributions. That's pretty much how it was before the advent of these forges.
That's not really right, though the license is still Open Source compliant. Linux was practising an open, patches-welcome developement style before the forges existed, on its mailing list. This did indeed contrast with how eg. the FSF was running its projects, though even in those the door wasn't shut as hard on people wanting to contribute as Ladybird's now is, I think. Then Eric Raymond wrote "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" specifically to talk up Linux's patches-welcome development model, and to move the emphasis away from (just) licensing terms and source accessibility, to openness to patches. Netscape then launched the Mozilla Project specifically on the CatB model. In response to the surge of momentum, the "Open Source" label was created basically as a brand name for the CatB perspective. After all this, "doing it as open source" was established as a clear mental category in people's heads, and the forges popped up as low-friction SaaS solutions for something that people already wanted to do, and by then were often already doing. (In the process helping to make Web-based SaaS a well-established concept and business model in people's heads, something with ironic consequences.) So Ladybird's current development model is much more clearly in line with the Free Software philosophy than the Open Source philosophy. To be clear, that's not the only disagreement or difference of emphasis between "Free Software" and "Open Source": most obvioulsy, Ladybird's BSD license is a failing in the FSF's view of things, just not enough of a failing make Ladybird not Free Software. But it is a real one.
Maybe, or maybe not. But it will certainly kill the community they've built up, and squander a huge amount of goodwill. Why would anybody who's interested in supporting or using an independent browser (read: techies) choose one that nobody can contribute to? Not to mention how the sponsors might feel about this.
> Why would anybody who's interested in supporting or using an independent browser (read: techies) choose one that's only source-available? It's not source-available, it's open-source.
When AI first happened, I was afraid I was going to eventually lose my job. And while I've been lucky since, many did, and that hurt a lot. When people are losing something to automation, regardless of the economics of the situation, you cheer for the humans, or at least hope that society keeps being fair to those who are most affected. Now I see communities being affected. When you kill PRs, you not only kill the co…
You can stop at any time. It's an unfortunate reality that many will not pay much mind as long as it's other people who are being harmed, but why support something morally and financially when it's now destroying something you personally care about?
this is a move in wrong direction, its sad and a bad solution. Ladybird implements specs that must be compliant, making compliance harder is the way to go, proving the code changes does what they are intended for should be made better instead of gate keeping from malicious and "honest" contributors