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Sunsetting Jazzband

jazzband.co

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Re: Sunsetting Jazzband

#31

Post by comet_browser »

Jazzband's model was interesting precisely because it tried to solve the bus factor problem by distributing maintainership across a community. The fact that it's sunsetting suggests the problem runs deeper than just individual maintainer burnout.

The real gap is that there's no natural mechanism for projects that are critical infrastructure for many companies to capture even a tiny fraction of the value they create. pip, Django, and the whole ecosystem that Jazzband helped steward are worth billions in aggregate business value. Their maintenance costs a few thousand dollars a year in volunteer time.

I don't think licensing changes alone fix this. Companies have legal teams that can route around them. What might actually work: large package registries (PyPI, npm) implementing a voluntary but strongly encouraged funding mechanism where companies self-report their usage and contribute to a foundation pool. It would need to be opt-in and friction-free, but even 10% adoption from mid-sized companies would transform the economics.

Re: Sunsetting Jazzband

#32

Post by idle_zealot »

indymike wrote: post #9
idle_zealot wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The decision of the market seems pretty clear. We've been able to co-operate and build a software commons for decades, iterating on and improving shared infrastructure and solutions to problems common and niche. The work done for these commons, though, benefits everyone, and that's a hard sell for a profit-driven organization. So the commons are enriched with a) volunteers b) brief windows in which corporate decision…

> Now companies selling LLM coding agents enter the scene, promising to eliminate their customers' dependence on the commons, and whatever minimal obligations they had to support it. This is misguided. Maintenance of LLM code has a far greater cost than generating it. > They prefer a future where computer programs are purchased by the token from model providers to one where they might have to unintentionally help out…

> This is misguided. Maintenance of LLM code has a far greater cost than generating it.

I agree. I'm just observing what they're doing.

> I don't think that's even a thought. The thought is that "no one can tell me no".

I doubt there's any one thought driving things. I didn't mean to imply the existence of some grand strategy or scheme. The preference I speak of isn't of any person, it's the direction pointed at by incentives and circumstance. Companies will make decisions to steer clear of helping competitors. Separately, they signal great interest in replacing costs spent on labor with costs spent on services. See the transition to cloud. The result is the preference of a world where code is like gasoline, purchased from a handful of suppliers for metered cost.

Re: Sunsetting Jazzband

#33

Post by vova_hn2 »

> Jazzband was always a one-roadie operation. People asked for more roadies and offered to help over the years, and I tried a number of times to make it work – but it never stuck.

Not sure what exactly prevented him from accepting more people into the role of "roadies"...

Re: Sunsetting Jazzband

#34

Post by actionfromafar »

iqihs wrote: post #6

is it unrealistic to think the companies that benefit from orgs such as this could donate a fraction of a percent of their wealth to keep them going? the responsibility always seems to fall most on those with the least resources.

It's called "taxation" but it's not very popular.

Re: Sunsetting Jazzband

#35

Post by vova_hn2 »

indymike wrote: post #23
doublerabbit wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is misguided. Maintenance of LLM code has a far greater cost than generating it. In corporate reality they don't care. They have their product, requirement. As it starts to rot it's easier to rebuild than to maintain. If you can ask for an LLM with a skeleton crew team now they can do it all again in five years time with the next level of LLMs.

Yes, it is precisely misguided, and will be in five years, too. Software lasts way longer than people think it does.

> Software lasts way longer than people think it does.

It was true, but I'm not sure if it's still true in the age of LLMs. Maybe we are moving into the era of disposable software.

Re: Sunsetting Jazzband

#36

Post by slopinthebag »

benatkin wrote: post #30
righthand wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://github.com/ghostty-org/ghostty/tree/main/.agents/com... Is my best guess. The GP is perhaps referring to ghostty repo adding helper files for Llm agents to operate as a cursory look at issues to placate issue submitters.

No, that Ghostty is improving much more rapidly than it would be without agentic coding, In spite of a painful transition.

Have you listened to Mitchell Hashimoto talk about how he uses AI? He is not a vibe coder by any definition of the term.

Re: Sunsetting Jazzband

#37

Post by stavros »

mentalgear wrote: post #13
iqihs wrote: post #6

is it unrealistic to think the companies that benefit from orgs such as this could donate a fraction of a percent of their wealth to keep them going? the responsibility always seems to fall most on those with the least resources.

It seems the open-source experiment has failed. Hundreds of billion-dollar companies have been built on millions of hours of free labor, on the backs of ten thousands of now-burnt-out maintainers. Yet, apart from token gestures, these exploiting entities have never shared substantial or equitable profits back. For the next generation of OSS, it would be wise to stand together and introduce a new licensing model: if a…

Just use the AGPL.

Re: Sunsetting Jazzband

#38

Post by rtpg »

vova_hn2 wrote: post #33

> Jazzband was always a one-roadie operation. People asked for more roadies and offered to help over the years, and I tried a number of times to make it work – but it never stuck. Not sure what exactly prevented him from accepting more people into the role of "roadies"...

The level of trust required is immense. We’re talking about a position where you get the keys to the kingdom to a very large number of projects

I would say that having roadie level access is equivalent to having access to Django core. I have never seen a recent Django project that isn’t pulling something from jazzband

Despite this I think it’s important to highlight that even in that world jazzband had a lot of infra so that projects could do things like releases cleanly and safely (we aren’t doing direct project releases to pypi but going through jazzband infra to do the release). So release maintainers have a lot less access despite releases “coming from” Jazzband

Re: Sunsetting Jazzband

#39

Post by vova_hn2 »

rtpg wrote: post #38
vova_hn2 wrote: post #33

> Jazzband was always a one-roadie operation. People asked for more roadies and offered to help over the years, and I tried a number of times to make it work – but it never stuck. Not sure what exactly prevented him from accepting more people into the role of "roadies"...

The level of trust required is immense. We’re talking about a position where you get the keys to the kingdom to a very large number of projects I would say that having roadie level access is equivalent to having access to Django core. I have never seen a recent Django project that isn’t pulling something from jazzband Despite this I think it’s important to highlight that even in that world jazzband had a lot of infra…

> The level of trust required

Maybe it could be mitigated by having some kind of council and requiring m out of n signatures to do anything?

I know that people on HN hate Bitcoin, so I'm always a bit vary to use it as an example.

But I think that in such cases having something similar to Bitcoin multisig could help.

Re: Sunsetting Jazzband

#40

Post by Ferret7446 »

iqihs wrote: post #6

is it unrealistic to think the companies that benefit from orgs such as this could donate a fraction of a percent of their wealth to keep them going? the responsibility always seems to fall most on those with the least resources.

We really need to stop this misconception about FOSS. Free software is provided as is, with no obligations on either party (minus the viral clause of copyleft). The user is not obligated to "contribute" in any way, and the provider is not obligated to support in any way. It is a single one off donation of work from the author to the public.
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