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

  • refalo@programming.dev
    6·
    2 days ago

    Protest forks never survive though. They always start overly ambitious and then realize how much of a full-time job it really is, and eventually give up.

    • eleijeep@piefed.socialEnglish
      3·
      1 day ago

      The ones that survive are the ones that you forget are forks

      LibreOffice (from OpenOffice)
      Jenkins (from Hudson)
      VeraCrypt (from TrueCrypt)
      ValKey (from Redis)
      MariaDB (from MySQL)
      LibreWolf, Waterfox et al. (from Firefox)
      Angie (from nginx)
      CoMaps (from Organic Maps)

      The list goes on and on. Just about every Linux distribution is derived from one of the three or four earliest ones.

      • refalo@programming.dev
        1·
        50 minutes ago

        I don’t consider those purely protest forks in the same sense as say, the GIMP fork called Glimpse.