Open Source Maintainers Owe You Nothing
mikemcquaid.com
This post is heavily inspired by my experience over the last ten years participating in the open source community and eight years as a maintainer of Homebrew (which I’ve maintained longer than anyone else at this point).

For those outside the loop: rsync starting using AI agents to handle the influx of AI security reports to improve the test suite and fix bugs. It introduced a few CVEs and people who never contributed in any way started firing shots at the maintainer.

rsync maintainer’s response to the people getting pissy about his usage of AI: medium and the related post on programming.dev

  • Feyd@programming.dev
    24·
    2 days ago

    Maintainers don’t owe you free work, but critiquing bad engineering practices that are publicly visible is valuable discourse. The dude is a legend but he basically sabotaged the project with irresponsible LLM use.

    And I’m definitely not impressed with his blog post trying to deflect by bringing up topics like whether LLMs are intelligent. He says he retired and would rather be sailing? OK go sailing dude. Don’t wreck the project and break people’s backup systems with your shitty LLM experiments.

    • Zetta@mander.xyz
      9·
      2 days ago

      According to the blog he broke some niche setups in the name of security fixes and is working on fixing those niche issues. Its his project to “wreck”, go use open rsync that fails 85 of the 95 rsync tests. Or maybe stop complaining and help work on the project if you actually care

      • Feyd@programming.dev
        14·
        2 days ago

        The blog is damage control for his reputation because his vibe coding experiment didn’t pan out. I don’t care if he says he used it responsibly because it’s clear as day that he did not. We can see the git history.

        go use open rsync that fails 85 of the 95 rsync tests

        And the new test suite is what is vibe coded lol https://neuromatch.social/@jonny/116666900898570791

        It would be better for literally everyone including himself if he did nothing. If he wants to be retired he should just be retired.

        Its his project to “wreck”

        Sure he clearly can do that. It is also the public’s prerogative to discuss activities happening in public and their effects. Just like he can be famous for making rsync in the first place, he can be famous for breaking everyone’s backups with vibe coding.

        Edit: and people discussing dissatisfaction with the direction or governance of a project is the precursor to a relevant fork, so everyone saying “stop complaining or maintain it yourself” is completely misunderstanding how the ecosystem works.