State of Open Source
It feels like open source has fallen off a cliff this year. It’s been on a downhill slide the past few years with all the corporate shenanigans. You have the hyperscalers implementing cloud services around open source projects while contributing little to nothing in return, and you have investor-backed “open source” companies that use a permissive license initially to build a community and then performing a licensing change rug pull to make the project proprietary. If all that wasn’t bad enough, now we’ve heaped on a steaming pile of AI slop in the form of drive-by contributions and a non-stop procession of CVEs. I just don’t see how this will be sustainable under the original principles of open source and free software.
There may be a glimpse of hope in the form of new licenses that put an end to freeloading corporations, but that is at the expense of the principles and ideals that made open source and free software great in the first place. I fear for the smaller projects. Projects that have one or two maintainers will struggle to get corporate sponsorship, and in many cases the maintainers won’t want the responsibility that goes along with that money. Projects are already disabling public contributions and I think that is a reasonable reaction. Projects that already have corporate backing will likely continue, but I imagine small projects will dry up as maintainers burn out from having to triage AI slop contributions and security issues.
I’m not sure open is “dead”, but I think it’s going to evolve into something that will be a pale shadow of what it originally was.
