Open source does not imply open community • Hacker News Board

Re: Open source does not imply open community

#41

Post by locknitpicker » Sun, May 03, 2026, 7:44 AM UTC

jauntywundrkind wrote: post #2

Isolating up is the opposite of interesting to me. What's clear is they mediating all selection choice and interest through pressure points of a single fixed trust board is of limited use going forward. I don't think the vouches and other web of trusts tackle the actual root need to disaggregate, decentralize. You can anti-social open source, reject, flee to nihil and going away, solo-ing. I think that's mad bad and…

> You can anti-social open source, reject, flee to nihil and going away, solo-ing. I think that's mad bad and dumb; just my judgement call.

I don't think this opinion was thought all the way through. Think about this: you are a developer who worked on a small library for fun. You decided to release it because it's cool and you are proud of it and perhaps someone else might find it useful as well. Should this bound you to spend any of your personal time appeasing any whim from low-effort but highly opinionated random people who happened to come across the project? Should you now be forced to take time out of your day to do what amounts to customer support requests? If not, should you be pressured to unshare your code?

Listen, if you are so hell bent on doing all that work then please fork the project and take over those tasks. How come the expectation is always that others should do all the work that you wish to benefit from?

Re: Open source does not imply open community

#42

Post by ocdtrekkie » Sun, May 03, 2026, 7:50 AM UTC

I certainly don't think people should feel obligated to support random Internet people but often the reasons people like these open venues is the low friction of a community member offering up something genuinely useful. Be clear what you do and don't want and will and won't do, doesn't mean turning off the tools is the solution.

Personally someone using code I wrote or reporting a bug feels motivating to me, it'll probably push me to do something I myself benefit from. But I also am not afraid to tell someone no.

Re: Open source does not imply open community

#43

Post by ahmetson » Sun, May 03, 2026, 7:54 AM UTC

molticrystal wrote: post #12

Even the most closed community will often accept a contribution if you are polite and email them. An open source developer had disabled pull requests and other operations on their repository because they were fed up with harassment. They gained a reputation for being extremely disagreeable at that time. I was unaware of this and simply assumed that was how the project worked. I had to do some minor investigative work…

Is it happening in the popular repos?

Re: Open source does not imply open community

#44

Post by jauntywundrkind » Sun, May 03, 2026, 7:55 AM UTC

locknitpicker wrote: post #41

jauntywundrkind wrote: post #2

Isolating up is the opposite of interesting to me. What's clear is they mediating all selection choice and interest through pressure points of a single fixed trust board is of limited use going forward. I don't think the vouches and other web of trusts tackle the actual root need to disaggregate, decentralize. You can anti-social open source, reject, flee to nihil and going away, solo-ing. I think that's mad bad and…

> You can anti-social open source, reject, flee to nihil and going away, solo-ing. I think that's mad bad and dumb; just my judgement call. I don't think this opinion was thought all the way through. Think about this: you are a developer who worked on a small library for fun. You decided to release it because it's cool and you are proud of it and perhaps someone else might find it useful as well. Should this bound yo…

I literally discussed a tool for socializing how to share things without gating a maintainer.

Re: Open source does not imply open community

#45

Post by satisfice » Sun, May 03, 2026, 8:01 AM UTC

This is only even an issue if your repo is unusually popular. I put repos out that I am excited about but almost no one else seems to care.

I don’t want the contributions of strangers and no one seems to want to contribute anyway. I open sourced it just to make a place for someone to find it and fork it if they please.

Are there really people out there who don’t realize its okay not to do unpaid labor for randos?

Re: Open source does not imply open community

#46

Post by saagarjha » Sun, May 03, 2026, 8:23 AM UTC

Levitz wrote: post #18

wisty wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every political group has bad faith actors who care more about winning the argument than the truth. And worse faith actors who are just there to trash talk people. Just look at the red button / blue button argument (where the vitriol in the debate would only make sense if the buttons were real, or if people like being jerks). Better faith CoC people talk about freedom of association vs freedom of speech - if a platfo…

>Better faith CoC people talk about freedom of association vs freedom of speech - if a platform doesn't like their oppponents, isn't it fine to ban them? Sure, but the problem here is far more insidious. By latching into delicate and, at times, controversial issues, CoC may hold a project hostage and threaten character assassination. Imagine that for some bizarre reason, CoC establishes that issues are only to be tal…

And your argument is that the CoC that does the Monday thing is better, or what?

Re: Open source does not imply open community

#47

Post by imtringued » Sun, May 03, 2026, 8:33 AM UTC

wisty wrote: post #4

NordStreamYacht wrote: post #3

The CoC crowd are there to only instigate trouble.

Every political group has bad faith actors who care more about winning the argument than the truth. And worse faith actors who are just there to trash talk people. Just look at the red button / blue button argument (where the vitriol in the debate would only make sense if the buttons were real, or if people like being jerks). Better faith CoC people talk about freedom of association vs freedom of speech - if a platfo…

The blue red button thing only works as a hypothetical. If it was real everyone would be choosing the same button and if blue was ever unlucky enough to lose, life would just go on for a majority of people.

Re: Open source does not imply open community

#48

Post by grahamlee » Sun, May 03, 2026, 8:41 AM UTC

_ZeD_ wrote: post #26

mitchellh wrote: post #8

Yep! To be more specific, Open Source only promises the four fundamental freedoms ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Free_Software_Definition ). It promises literally NOTHING else, including zero cost. Free and open source software can and should cost money! (The "free" in "free and open source" is not about money, people!) I'm actually very enthusiastic about these OSS "supply chain" attacks that have been happenin…

>>> To be more specific, Open Source only promises the four fundamental freedoms ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Free_Software_Definition ). no, that is FSF's free software. I'm sick of coming here and see "open source" as something with "moral values" - stealing it from the free software with "the magic" of conflating the two concepts. Open source is just big software companies stealing from innumerable voluntee…

If you look at the Open Source Definition, you see the four freedoms: https://opensource.org/osd

That’s unsurprising because the OSD is based on the Debian social contract, and Debian is a GNU distribution.

Re: Open source does not imply open community

#49

Post by ranger_danger » Sun, May 03, 2026, 10:03 AM UTC

qingcharles wrote: post #40

opan wrote: post #34

I thought this was going to be about the widespread issue of free software projects trying to make you use Discord to discuss or report things. There was a week or two where I saw people expressing interest in moving to other things, but that already seems to have died down. I assume they all gave up and went back to Discord after all.

Every open source project I look at right now uses Discord, to my chagrin. Discord isn't totally awful, but it's ephemeral and requires a huge bloated web app.

Doubly frustrating is that I can't even use Discord if I wanted to. Every time I try to make an account, it gets banned or phone-walled almost immediately afterwards. This has been a known problem with them for years with many people, and even if you try to appeal your ban, you just get "our automated system is working properly, goodbye."

Re: Open source does not imply open community

#50

Post by MathMonkeyMan » Sun, May 03, 2026, 10:06 AM UTC

satisfice wrote: post #45

This is only even an issue if your repo is unusually popular. I put repos out that I am excited about but almost no one else seems to care. I don’t want the contributions of strangers and no one seems to want to contribute anyway. I open sourced it just to make a place for someone to find it and fork it if they please. Are there really people out there who don’t realize its okay not to do unpaid labor for randos?

Yes, it's often the randos who feel this way.