Open Source Does Not Imply Open Community

Nothing I ever write will be popular and I won’t ever force myself to work on my own projects I dont enjoy. Everything I write is without warranty nor guarantee.

My [own] projects don’t get popular, so having issues enabled doesn’t cause issues. :P

Turn off the issues tracker and the pull requests or deploy a bare git server for releasing your code. Find a small group of people you really know and trust and work with them on projects, or do it completely alone.

You don’t need to allow strangers to invade your space. You don’t need a performative Code of Conduct or an LLM policy. Open source doesn’t need to be developed openly for it to be “open source”.

Write code. Make things you like. Use any tools you want. Do code drops at 2am on Christmas day. Whatever you do, don’t get tricked into running an operation that’s half tech incubator and half daycare for people whose parents gave them a keyboard and no social skills.

I like this “my workshop has glass walls, but I’m wearing headphones and the doors are locked” model of open source.

People really can’t help themselves without indulging in some false dichotomying, with some historical revisionism seasoning on top.

You can have your project with PRs and issues enabled, but without any “community” bureaucracy or Code of Conducts or performative AI policies or whatever.

And guess what? That’s how most projects operated for the longest time, and that’s what many of them still do. And people didn’t go straight from ftp servers to CoCs anyway (that’s the revisionist part).

And this faux open-source pompous attitude, not uncommon in the microblogtard sphere, is as foreign to hardcore open-source attitude, as the dimwitted anti-meritocratic wave we had in the last decade.

“it implies, but sometimes it is not” what you wanted to write

Android is also open source, but I do not want all open source software to become like android. What makes most open source good is not just the available source code, nor just the software freedoms, it’s also that it’s built openly, by the users. So please don’t turn issues and PRs off.

I find community to be an important part, if not the most important one, of the FOSS. It doesn’t always mean pressure and demands, it is often help and improvements.

It would be even nicer if there were no bad actors, thought