Nvim-treesitter (13K+ Stars) is Archived

The thing I’m publishing is currently the only public source of that information and code worldwide. For those who need it, there is literally no competition, unless someone else opens Ghidra and reproduce my efforts over several long years from scratch. I don’t publish because I want to play numbers-go-up with the world population; I publish because I invested years of research for my own benefit and wish those who come after me to have a starting place further along than where I had to begin. Sure, it’ll benefit users, but ‘on the shoulders of giants’ only works when you publish at all.

There are only maybe a few thousand people at most worldwide who could benefit from what I’m doing, and only 1% of them might actually go looking for this. Can you imagine working as an open source maintainer on a project with a hard cap on audience size of a hundred people? Seems fine to me; I’m one of those hundred, after all :)

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Very strange attitude towards open source. One guy decides to stop working for free, leaving all of his work publicly accessible for anyone to continue to build upon, and the response is "well, I guess that's the end of that project".

I'm guessing the attitude of "users and supporters" of the project such as shushtain complaining and wanting clason to do all the work instead of just doing it themselves, was a factor in him deciding to step away from the project.

Do you believe in ownership of physical property?

Surely you have to understand that you own a plot of land, a house, the number in your bank account or the clothes on your back only to the extent that somebody is willing to perform violence on those who want to use "your property" for themselves. That might be you yourself but you can't be everywhere at once and you can't be awake all the time either. That protection comes from mutual agreement of people to defend each other's properties, usually through some institution such as the police/army/state.

Why should intellectual property be any different?

Why should I not be able to make an agreement with people like me that we only allow certain people to use our work under certain conditions and if any one of us violates the agreement (or an outsider decides to ignore it) we use violence to stop and punish that use?

> the people you're giving the stuff away to

Not giving it to them, they are taking it. I am making it available with instructions who can use it and how. Some people take it, following those instructions, some take it ignoring them. Would you use the word "give" if it was about leaked source code? What about leaked nudes of your girlfriend or daughter?

> See: all of the AIs being trained on publicly accessible code (regardless of its license).

That's a circular argument.

LLM companies claim what they're doing is legal. At best they're using a loophole - statistical interpolating autocompleters did not exist when copyright law was being written, I doubt many people could conceive of them at that time. At worst they are actively and knowingly violating the law, not to mention consent, of the best most altruistic people in the world to exploit them and bring about a new era of inequality and oppression.

Anyway, just because somebody gets away with something does not make it legal and certainly does not make it right.

> That's just a consequence you'll have to accept.

Or I can build both social and technical means to control the usage. Nothing is perfect but then if you want perfect, why do you lock your car or home?