You thought your browser was compromised? Pathetic.

I think the attitude frequently adopted by open source maintainers - comparing themselves to Spielberg - has been a major roadblock to anyone looking to contribute to open source projects for years.

Why are you looking to contribute to open source projects? If you have a fix or a new feature, you can share the diff in variety of ways. The maintainers are not obligated to review, discuss, and accept your changes.

I’m not entirely following you. I generally don’t contribute anymore, but in the past I’ve found a lot of maintainers are not actually looking for collaboration, rather free labor.

I certainly understand things are different nowadays, I’m talking pre-LLM proliferation.

> I’ve found a lot of maintainers are not actually looking for collaboration, rather free labor.

Do you think that maintainers lack domain expertise? A nice bug report is way more helpful than a random pull request. A patch, even when correct, can be counterproductive, if it conflicts with the roadmap and goal of the project.

The goal of open source is to give you freedom in maintaining your own version and extending it. Collaboration is not a requirement.

Agree that even prior to LLMs those projects weren't terribly welcoming as per Linus' famous email comments (chalk it up to cultural communication differences :) )

I don’t know if it’s just me, and these days I do understand it given the widespread adoption of LLMs, but I’ve always detested the idea that I need to reach out and have a conversation with the maintainer before opening a PR. Especially (mainly) when the PR is simply addressing an approved GH issue.

I’ve had so many perfectly acceptable PRs rejected over the years simply because they didn’t “fit the vision” of the maintainer, despite being +1’d by many members of the community or even other contributors. I don’t even mean to imply they were rude or anything, just uninterested in actually merging anything where they didn’t architect the changes themselves upfront.

On one hand I get it, you’ve spent so much time building something it’s fair to want to hold on tightly to that level of control, but to me it's just always felt antithetical to the entire idea of open source.

Makes me feel like I’m not contributing to a true open source project, just doing free labor for someone.

Well that's horribly reductive. I certainly do not expect everyone in a given field to know absolutely everything there is to know in that field.

Crazy enough, I also hold doctors and surgeons to higher standards than web developers.

If those web developers fail a critical government service, or online pharmacy or financial service, it can mess up peoples life pretty badly as well.

Yes it's truly a shame when the people responsible for critical infrastructure only hire the cheap inexperienced software engineers to build it.

Much like how relying on a resident nurse instead of a cardiologist when you are experiencing a heart attack can end your life pretty badly as well.

100% agree, and so happy to see somebody call this out. If you go on /r/SelfHosted or any other novice oriented forum, you’ll quickly realize that most users are simply “keeping up with the joneses” when it comes to security & redundancy. That itself is fine I guess, but the zero tolerance they have for anything else is just absurd.

Right right, I'd prefer management lock themselves in a closet and not engage with the outside world.

If you enjoy the flamewar, check out /r/SelfHosted which has been losing it's mind over the last few months. The heavy heavy majority of that community is somehow incredibly anti AI despite the fact that the previous "spammy" posts (before ai assisted projects) were all "what is wrong with my docker compose file"??

I had to unsub from that subreddit when I saw a cool new application and the top comments were just dogging it for the signs of Claude Code (claude.md).

This is a subreddit about selfhosting things others built for free. Honestly, often for piracy purposes. It's insane how entitled people have become.

Absolutely. Really gross to see. Heavy majority of the complaints boil down to “I can’t blindly trust everything posted here now?” - as if they could before?? So entitled.

Also annoys me that all of the suggestions on how to handle filtering AI demonstrate a clear lack of understanding around how agentic coding works. Like if you can’t be bothered to understand why “ban any project that uses AI” is not possible, the entire subreddit is probably above your pay grade…

Unless someone is trolling, it’s rare for people to deem it as “useless”. Most counterpoints have been about ethics and issues that surround LLM usage. Things like licensing, coding vs review time, correctness and maintainability of the generated code, etc… Unless you believe we’re in a software engineering utopia, I think it’s fair to call those out.

I think it’s fair to call those things out 100% of the time regardless of the LLM usage. Not sure what gave you the impression otherwise.

Probably just needs a slight update to expand the relevant context of child comments. I bet it's still comparing "What's the catch?" to the OP article.

Exactly their point. That $50k of rent includes the cost of repairs & upgrades. The $50k you pay the bank does not.

People want prosperous livelihoods not just jobs. Do you think those working those low paying dead end jobs are just completely content with having zero mobility or financial security?

That uber driving might be living in their car but at least they are employed right??