Congrats guys! We did it!

We took a project that someone made for free, shared it to the internet for others to enjoy, worked on in his spare time, and killed it because of his choice in tools. Sure he was probably overwhelmed with issues counting up and demands from his users on his project that he made for free, but he should have developed his application in the way we demanded. It’s truly for the greater good that we have one less free open source project out there, and one less developer working on his passion project.

Seriously. I loathe AI’s encroachment into everything. Copilot and OpenAI are being absolute assholes. However, the people who scream against it on message boards and and tell fellow engineers that they’re evil for using it are honestly approaching about the same level of annoyance to me. Should AI be everywhere? Absolutely not. Does it have actual uses? Absolutely it does. Is AI killing software engineering? Debatable. What isn’t debatable is that us, people, killed this project. We can debate about the ethics of AI for ages. That’s not the point of this comment though.

Right now, an open source project has closed, and some guy who made this for free and shared it with us will probably never develop in the open source community again, AI or not. Open source should mean that anyone can write anything for fun or seriously, and we all have the choice to use it or not. It doesn’t matter if it’s silly or useful or nonsense or horrible, open source means open. Instead we shut down/closed out someone who was contributing. How they were contributing is irrelevant, what is relevant is that they probably never will again. Open means open, open to anyone and everyone. We should all feel ashamed that an open source project was shuttered because of how our community acted.

As far as I followed this whole ordeal, his use of ai was maybe 20% of what went wrong with this project. Open contempt for FOSS principles and his contributors, a unilateral (and probably illegal) change in license, Discord censorship, API gatekeeping and disingenuous monetization, along with a general dishonest communicationwere probably more of a nail in this coffin then the use of ai code assistance

I’m unaware of these, but I’ll take you at your word. I still say even if the guy is an asshole, we still lost someone who was contributing. If he is picking up his toys and going home, we still lost a developer. I wasn’t there for those issues so I don’t know how they were handled.

I’ll compare it to Lemmy. Lemmy devs are (sorry guys) I’ll say… Disagreeable. They are headstrong and definitely have their own opinions which I have different opinions are about. I don’t think we would be friends. However, look at what they built, and the communities we’ve built thanks to their work. They started all of this, and now we have mbin and piefed and others thanks to what they started, even if don’t like how they handle things. We should always remember that the people contribute, and that’s more than the vast majority of us.

(Not directed only at you commenter, but everyone else reading this to share my point of view)