katMar 5

Re: genAI killing open source, one strategy I've been pursuing lately is closed-sourcing everything going forward, but forming human relationships with other developers. I then literally just... send them code for stuff that would help their projects, from my own codebases, and tell them they can feel free to integrate it without owing me anything.

I've been feeling pretty good about that strategy so far. I like that it places my human relationships first, without exposing my work to either corporate exploitation or LLM mining (for later corporate exploitation).

Show threadkatMar 5
turns out you can just tell people "hey I have a small private package to do this thing that you're struggling with, do you want me to just add you to the private repo so you can reference or copy it wholesale? Just credit me."
Show threadNelson

@zkat One problem is that personal relationships can sour. If you're building a piece of software that you need, and you rely on personal relationships to provide dependencies, what if they suddenly hate you?

My friend group had a breakup because one person had a video production business, got a friend's permission to show them in a video, then the friend changed their mind. Rather than simply talk to the video pal, they sent a takedown request to YouTube, threatening the business's existence.

Mar 5 at 5:18pmWeb
Show threadShauna GMMar 5

@skyfaller

That is a problem, but structuring our lives and work around relationships gives us an incentive to learn relational skills and build stronger relationships to mitigate the problems.

Show threadNelsonMar 5

@shauna I think what I was trying to get at is that open source offers / offered a promise of being able to build on code without depending on any specific personal or business relationship, that the work could continue without anyone being indispensable. You can see how that could be twisted to help capitalists, but it is also dangerous to communities for any person or group/corporation to be impossible to replace.

Forget friend breakups, what if the author dies... Can you invite helpers now?

Show threadShauna GMMar 5

@skyfaller

I think I understand your perspective here. But I also think that the tech industry, whether big tech or open source or crypto or AI, is constantly holding out the false promise that if you just use this tool or that tech, you won't have to worry about human relationships. And to me this is a pyrrhic victory, if it's even achievable at all. When tools replace relationships everything gets very fragile.