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

  • bountygiver [any]@lemmy.mlEnglish
    3·
    9 hours ago

    Yes they don’t owe us that. Just as the users don’t owe them to have to use the main branch. If they have shown they are no longer fit to maintain, we have to make such information known so users can decide if they want to fork/look for alternatives.