I got into #FLOSS because it was a community-driven approach to making computers empower people.

[jrbe@scholar.social]

I got into #FLOSS because it was a community-driven approach to making computers empower people. Now, #opensource means "free training data for someone else's LLM."

I could ask, "What is the future of open source software," but I think that's the wrong question. I'd rather contemplate what community-driven, human-centering computing can look like in the era of scraping and slop.

[kfears@mstdn.games]

@jrbe As far as we're concerned, the answer has and continues to be the same.

Actually build a fucking community. Document your values and stand for them. Don't sit back and wait for people to contribute - actively reach them out first, learn how they can help, and accommodate their onboarding. Make space for people with diverse skills. It is a community-oriented project - so do community and activism, not the code.

FOSS has long been dead in this regard, with every project just being 10 active nerds with 100 who ever submitted a PR while the usage is in tens of thousands being celebrated as some big success. No - each of those projects is a massive failure, even if the code solves some problems.

[lhp@mastodon.social]

@jrbe the golden age of FOSS is definitely over. Many foundational, irreplaceable projects have been infected by AI generated contributions.

And completely regardless of the AI outputs quality, I doubt companies in the future will feel any incentive to contribute anything back; Some C-suite will always think they can wing it with AI.

So going forward, if we want a slop-free stack, we either have to stick to old versions or massively reduce scope. And that's not even touching hardware support