Open source does not imply open community

https://blog.feld.me/posts/2026/04/open-source-does-not-imply-open-community/

by RohanAdwankar • 3 months ago

194 83 3 months ago

blog.feld.me

Isolating up is the opposite of interesting to me.

What's clear is they mediating all selection choice and interest through pressure points of a single fixed trust board is of limited use going forward. I don't think the vouches and other web of trusts tackle the actual root need to disaggregate, decentralize.

You can anti-social open source, reject, flee to nihil and going away, solo-ing. I think that's mad bad and dumb; just my judgement call. I agree strongly with v-it, open source is social. It's interesting and fascinating to open your mind. These other signals are fascinating. The glut of goodness is something we should firehose better, not shy from. https://v-it.org/

cwillu• 3 months ago

I care about what my best friend finds interesting. I care about what the people I willingly interact with daily find interesting. I categorically do not care what jauntywundrkind finds interesting, and if that bothers them, they're welcome to not use the little knickknacks I make for my friends; the license permits that.

This is not antisocial.

OhMeadhbh3• 3 months ago

I have a friend who points out that in the FOSS community, fork == drama. Either the drama causes the fork or the fork causes drama. What you describe sounds more anti-drama than anti-social.

jauntywundrkind3• 3 months ago

Then our interests align! Great, fantastic, glad you are on board.

You didn't talk about being interested in what maintainers were up to. You talked about what your friends are interested in! That's the thing! We need to decentralize the decision making. If your friend is juggling some patches, some feature branches atop code you use, that is interesting. We seem to both agree that we do want to have interest & awareness.

We've only had one model for social ness ever and it's created enormous pinch-points, enormous thin-waist problems for getting stuff done. The maintainers themselves keep saying they can't handle the loads, don't enjoy it, don't want to. I think the submission is kind of a bad spirited loser but I'm sympathetic! I just think it's worth exploring pro social options before we all default to shutting down turning off all the exterior signals and going dark, like suggested. That sounds a lot like being a loser to me. Fine, do you! It sucks though, it really does. Everyone should hope aspire to & work for better. Let's discuss what that might look like.

locknitpicker4• 3 months ago

You can anti-social open source, reject, flee to nihil and going away, solo-ing. I think that's mad bad and dumb; just my judgement call.

I don't think this opinion was thought all the way through. Think about this: you are a developer who worked on a small library for fun. You decided to release it because it's cool and you are proud of it and perhaps someone else might find it useful as well. Should this bound you to spend any of your personal time appeasing any whim from low-effort but highly opinionated random people who happened to come across the project? Should you now be forced to take time out of your day to do what amounts to customer support requests? If not, should you be pressured to unshare your code?

Listen, if you are so hell bent on doing all that work then please fork the project and take over those tasks. How come the expectation is always that others should do all the work that you wish to benefit from?

jauntywundrkind3• 3 months ago

I literally discussed a tool for socializing how to share things without gating a maintainer.

NordStreamYacht• 3 months ago

The CoC crowd are there to only instigate trouble.

wisty• 3 months ago

Every political group has bad faith actors who care more about winning the argument than the truth. And worse faith actors who are just there to trash talk people. Just look at the red button / blue button argument (where the vitriol in the debate would only make sense if the buttons were real, or if people like being jerks).

Better faith CoC people talk about freedom of association vs freedom of speech - if a platform doesn't like their oppponents, isn't it fine to ban them? Or say it should just be treated as a more utilitarian "be nice" convention for the mailing list (obviously it depends who is calling the shots, but that is true in any project).

Levitz2• 3 months ago

Better faith CoC people talk about freedom of association vs freedom of speech - if a platform doesn't like their oppponents, isn't it fine to ban them?

Sure, but the problem here is far more insidious. By latching into delicate and, at times, controversial issues, CoC may hold a project hostage and threaten character assassination.

Imagine that for some bizarre reason, CoC establishes that issues are only to be talked about on Mondays. People can comply, or they can leave, no biggie. Strange but clear cut.

Now, say it instead establishes whatever politically motivated consideration. The choice now becomes one of positioning oneself into the current political climate. This makes sense at times, but also leaves a door open for abuse akin to rules lawyering, gotchas and crybullying. Sometimes creates a phantom HR that has no interest beyond exerting its power and which does d with no accountability.

Problem is anyone raising this as an issue or rejecting such proposal is going to look bad while doing so. It's easier to keep your head low.

imtringued• 3 months ago

The blue red button thing only works as a hypothetical. If it was real everyone would be choosing the same button and if blue was ever unlucky enough to lose, life would just go on for a majority of people.

xantronix• 3 months ago

At face value, CoCs are a way for open source project leaders to decide who gets to interact with the project. You can't have freedom of association while also demanding to participate in someone else's project on your terms when said terms contradict the wishes of the project leadership.

If I were to guess, the author may have intended "you don't need a performative Code of Conduct" to mean, if you're a small project and you just want to share with the world with the option of including contributions from outsiders in the future, you don't need to have a CoC right out the gate until there are situations that have already been encountered. No need to wrack your brain on purely hypothetical problems.

creatonez• 3 months ago

Having posted rules on a forum/mailing list/bug tracker is only done to cause trouble? Really?

Codes of conduct exist because the alternatives are either arbitrary punishment for arbitrary infractions, or complete spamfest anarchy. It baffles me that a crowd that previously preached netiquette are now so against clarity and healthy community. (Though on second thought, maybe this is a Goomba fallacy and the folks that have so much disdain for CoCs are the people who constantly spewed flame wars and spam on 1990s usenet)

OhMeadhbh3• 3 months ago

Greybeard here... let me start by saying I like the cut of the author's jib. I'm old enough to have sat before the elders of the arpanet when there were only 1's and they had to forge about half of them into 0's manually. Another thing about the old ways of making software is projects were often written or maintained by one or two people at a time. The intarwebs at large had their email addresses and mailed them bug reports directly. Some projects got discussed by the community on IRC or mailing lists. People were generally professional and if they weren't they were deleted from the mailing list or added to people's block files on iirc and pine.

But my point is... the active dev group was, at any time, very small. Mostly I'm talking about small utilities like make, Sendmail, sed, awk, sed. Perl seemed like it was just Larry Wall and tchrist for most of the time before 1990. gcc was an insane counter-example with a cast of thousands who submitted patches and you had to socialize your patch w/ RMS if you wanted it upstream.

oh wait... I forgot to make my point... My point is... the new tools support larger teams of people constantly interacting. I think there are great benefits to having a small team and effectively giving the middle finger to internet randos who don't submit their patches on one of their kidneys (i.e. - they'll think long and hard and sure as he'll won't submit two.) But getting people interested in your work output isn't one of those benefits. So... absolutely... go old school... But keep in mind the size of your team will be small and it may be hard to attract users.

But... screw users... I write software to support my own use cases. I open source it on the off chance someone else may find it useful.

sillysaurusx• 3 months ago

I laughed at “back when there were only 1’s and they had to forge about half of them into 0’s manually.” Stealing that one.

jolmg• 3 months ago

Weren't holes 1's? Were there machines where it was backwards?

zvr• 3 months ago

I concur completely. Back in those days, the very basic stuff you mention (awk, sed, make) were being built by a handful of people, all sitting together, and the few outsiders who were submitting enhancements (even before these were called "patches") knew the email addresses to send these to. For Sendmail, you should contact the people at Berkeley, for most of the others you sent to Bell Labs.

Then software started appearing from other points. We were getting new versions of software after email announcements -- and later on, on comp.sources.unix -- and we were reading the comments to see that other people were contributing, too.

The way you publish your software (especially today) essentially boils down to how much you are looking for contributors vs. users (vs. no one at all).

mitchellh• 3 months ago

Yep!

To be more specific, Open Source only promises the four fundamental freedoms (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Free_Software_Definition).

It promises literally NOTHING else, including zero cost. Free and open source software can and should cost money! (The "free" in "free and open source" is not about money, people!)

I'm actually very enthusiastic about these OSS "supply chain" attacks that have been happening in various communities. Because optimistically I hope it'll help people realize that OSS _is not a supply chain_ (more details here: https://lobste.rs/s/cxwidw/no_one_owes_you_supply_chain_secu...). Unless you're paying your vendor AND/OR have a contract in place with them with certain guarantees, you do not have a supply chain.

One term thats in almost every FOSS license is "this software is provided with no warranty." A supply chain implies a warranty. Therefore, FOSS is not a supply chain.

_ZeD_• 3 months ago

>> To be more specific, Open Source only promises the four fundamental freedoms (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Free_Software_Definition).

no, that is FSF's free software.

I'm sick of coming here and see "open source" as something with "moral values" - stealing it from the free software with "the magic" of conflating the two concepts.

Open source is just big software companies stealing from innumerable volunteers

grahamlee• 3 months ago

If you look at the Open Source Definition, you see the four freedoms: https://opensource.org/osd

That’s unsurprising because the OSD is based on the Debian social contract, and Debian is a GNU distribution.

engeljohnb9• 3 months ago

Open source is just big software companies stealing from innumerable volunteers

Whether you think this is true or not, MIT and BSD licenses still guarantee the four freedoms.

molticrystal• 3 months ago

Even the most closed community will often accept a contribution if you are polite and email them.

An open source developer had disabled pull requests and other operations on their repository because they were fed up with harassment. They gained a reputation for being extremely disagreeable at that time. I was unaware of this and simply assumed that was how the project worked. I had to do some minor investigative work to find their email address and I sent them a polite, low pressure email with my unsolicited patch and made it clear it was fine to use it or ignore it. They thanked me, explained the situation, even apologized for the difficulty, and said locking things down was the only way they knew to cope with the situation, and of course applied the fix.

ahmetson• 3 months ago

Is it happening in the popular repos?

skybrian• 3 months ago

I agree, and add:

You don't need to put up a marketing page that tries to convince people to use your software. Instead (or as well), consider explaining all the reasons why someone should not use your software. More users, more problems.

rvz• 3 months ago

I am out of ideas on this one.

The problem here is "open source" is seen as free support and working for "the community" for free and since the code is out there, no-one needs to pay the maintainers. (which is false)

Some mention GitHub sponsors as the solution, however it is a power-law system and benefits the very early participants or already famous developers to make a meaningful amount of income. But it is now at its late stage for everyone else. In some cases, some maintainers on sponsors get attacked / cancelled over a disagreement and that is the end.

It is completely thankless and unsustainable. $5 donations do not work either.

Now with AI, unless you are at a company that can afford it, there is little reason for human developer(s) to be working in open source and relying on $5 "sponsors" since AI agents are used to replace the need of paying for support for the developer.

What worked 20 years ago for paying for human support, now does not work today unless you do not mind about willing to work for free and spend some tokens. If you don't someone else will with an agent.

Not even Richard Stallman or the FSF makes money on this, nor do they have a solution in 2026 as it is unenforceable. But one thing that Stallman, Torvalds and other famous developers have is influence and that is what pays their bills.

ValdikSS4• 3 months ago

The article recalls people that open-source software is not necessary created for the community, but rather by the author, for the author oftentimes.

The "support" is not only the maintenance burden which (sometimes) could be solved for money. It's also the features that the original author just don't find useful at all, but others may want to have.

If I don't have Mac, never used it and don't plan to buy it, why would I want to accept contribution to support this platform? It's useless for me, I won't be able to test it (and it will break sooner or later), and once the code is accepted, it's usually assumed that it would be maintained by the application author, not the code contributor (unless additional CLA is signed, etc).

locknitpicker4• 3 months ago

The article recalls people that open-source software is not necessary created for the community, but rather by the author, for the author oftentimes.

Exactly. A FLOSS license essentially states "I put together this cool thing, please take a look and pass around."

When I published FLOSS projects of my own, my motivation was to share with the world something that was useful to me and that I enjoyed doing, in case it was of any use to anyone. Once I discovered a small FLOSS project of mine was used by a big name commercial software suite and I was tremendously surprised for finding out by googling it, and found it extremely funny. And that was it. Is this so outlandish?

locknitpicker4• 3 months ago

The problem here is "open source" is seen as free support and working for "the community" for free and since the code is out there, no-one needs to pay the maintainers. (which is false)

I don't think this is true at all. FLOSS just means you are free to download a project, use it, and distribute it. There is absolutely no promise or expectation from the public of maintenance, nor is there absolutely no promise or expectation of monetary compensation from contributors.

The sole promise is "here's the code, have fun".

Heck, there isn't even any expectation that end-users contribute anything back to the project.

If you are a developer and have an expectation of receiving any monetary compensation, you should rethink your licenses. If you are an end-user and have any expectation of receiving maintenance work then you should reach out to whoever you seek to handle said maintenance and sort out business arrangements. In fact, that's exactly how it works. See for example how corporations pay maintainers to contribute and be involved in FLOSS projects. For extreme cases, see how a group of companies were quick to fork Redis to Valkey the moment that Redis tried to strong-arm it's way out of a FLOSS project. They had no problem amassing a set of maintainers in their payroll to take care of the code.

I'm perplexed by this expectation of FLOSS guaranteeing salaries to random maintainers who stick around and don't want to deal with the public. There are a few nasty stereotypes emerging from that assumption. Perhaps those nurturing these expectations should check the actual licenses to verify exactly what they cover and ensure.

ValdikSS4• 3 months ago

  - FOSS applications don't have to be distributed publicly — that's only the common social expectation
  - FOSS does not imply that the code should be available for non-customers. The developer decides who is the customer.
  - FOSS is *encouraged* to be sold for money, *you can sell others' software, even if it's originally free of charge* (see https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.en.html)
  - Open-source licensed with non-free license is still open-source, although non-FOSS
  - You, as a developer, should not be ashamed to choose non-free open-source license if you want to earn (more) money on your software or apply additional restrictions for your benefit. It still could be copyleft.

TL;DR: we invented LICENSE.md and stick to it a lot, but nobody thought of making SOCIAL.md. When someone says "open source", many assume:

The author is making it "for people, for society, for everyone around them, interested in developing the project, adding new features (especially those I need), and improving it in every way for the benefit of all users. After all, if that's not the case, why even publish it?"

This, however, is just a most common social expectation of FOSS, but far from the only case. Lack of mention of this distinction between technical and social open source is the main cause of disagreements, disputes, and, ultimately, burnout due to misaligned social expectations.

I used to have to explain the problem and the difference to an outraged public, but recently I came across an article by Jeffrey Paul https://sneak.berlin/20250720/the-agpl-is-nonfree/ comparing open-source code to a gift! My explanation boiled down to:

"Don't like the gift, it doesn't suit you? Throw it out and forget it!"

pickaxepeter• 3 months ago

TL;DR: we invented LICENSE.md and stick to it a lot, but nobody thought of making SOCIAL.md.

I wonder if this always used to be the case, or is all this harassment the product of the past ~decade or so high exposure of open source software? As in no more sketchy websites or weird build pipelines to access them, they're basically slapped on github with an executable for anyone to use.

ValdikSS4• 3 months ago

The only instance of social contract I know is Debian's, initially from 1997.

https://www.debian.org/social_contract

I wonder if this always used to be the case

As written in the article of discussion, it used to be, well, quite a mess. There wasn't an established social expectation that you can ask author to do something, and they will do that. The whole software ecosystem was 100x smaller, and most of the users were tech-savvy. The author released the software somehow, this v1.0 got updated my "many" people (back than many meant 3-4-5), and then, after quite a while, it made a roundtrip back to the author, for which they "officially" released v1.1.

That's it, more or less. If no more bugs found, the software was considered as finished.

em-bee4• 3 months ago

Open-source licensed with non-free license is still open-source, although non-FOSS

nope. there are only a few licenses approved by OSI that are not also considered Free Software. https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html look at the long list of GPL incompatible Free Software licenses.

btw "open source that is non-FOSS" makes no sense because FOSS literally means Free and Open Source Software"

ValdikSS4• 3 months ago

there are only a few licenses approved by OSI that are not also considered Free Software

This is what I'm trying to conterpoint: you're thinking of "Free software" as in legal definition of GNU (4 freedoms), and "Open Source software" as in legal definition of OSI (10 points), in terms of the licenses approved by these organizations.

Users see open-source as a combination of legal/social/community expectations, as a phenomenon. Overwhelming majority of the software have only legal license, and nothing more, and oftentimes the developer themselves don't know what their social behavior should be, they're forming it given the circumstances.

We focused ONLY on the legal definition of open source for very long, and hardly spent time on the other, IMO much more important things: for whom this software is for, how should you communicate, what should you expect as a user, everything about social aspect, maintenance (which is out of scope of legal definitions of the software, but which made FOSS that appealing).

I've even seen cases where the author changed the license (used "legal measures") to prevent further community from forming around the software (to decimate users, to make the software less appealing to FOSS community), because it was too overwhelming to respond to everyone. Instead of using direct measures (social statements of some kind), they used license as a community control method. The author didn't really want to change the code license, they just didn't know other means to achieve different social expectations/behavior they want.

JimDabell7• 3 months ago

Open source is not merely a license choice. It is a reformulation of free software to make it more attractive to businesses. The entire point behind open source is that it is more effective for businesses to develop software collaboratively with the public than it is to do it in private. So yes, open source does imply open community.

If you want to dump code onto the public with a permissive license but not develop that software collaboratively, then sure, you can do that, and the code will be open source code. Opening the code is a good thing and there’s no obligation for you to do anything more. But it isn’t doing what open source was designed to do; it’s ignoring a key part of it.

The people that see open source code and assume that it is being developed collaboratively are not being unreasonable – that’s the purpose of the open source movement. If that’s an inaccurate assumption for your software, then that’s fine – but it’s you that is breaking social norms, not them.

BrandonM• 3 months ago

When you talk about the point or purpose of open source, what are you referring to? I think of Stallman, print drivers, and users owning their work, so your assertions about the point of open source ring false to me.

jraph2• 3 months ago

OP says open source is a reformulation of free software.

Stallman created free software and is distinctly against open source, which is more or less free software but without the philosophy, the concern for user rights [1]. Associating RMS and his printer with the purpose of open source would somewhat be a mistake / a faux pas (but would be nailing it for the purpose of free software!).

The purpose of free software is user freedom (and not the cooperative development). The original purpose of open source is selling the idea of free software to the corporate world by making it less scary to them, by trying to remove its political part. [I suspect the people who created open source might have been sensitive to the user freedom aspect and wanted to convince corporate to do free software for this reason but thought that hiding this part was a good strategy [2, 3]. I personally think this was a fatal mistake: nowadays, although the infrastructure is mostly open source (and has been succeeding in this regard), end user facing software is still mostly proprietary exactly because software companies don't think they ought to do free software.]

I don't think the cooperative development part is in the purpose of open source. In any case, the open source definition and the free software definition don't concern themselves with this and are purely about what you can do with the code.

Of course open source development models are intimately bound to open source and free software but and were one of the things sold to corporate as more efficient.

[1] https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point....

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruce_Perens#cite_note-18

[3] "It's Time to Talk About Free Software Again" http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/1999/debian-devel-19990...

JimDabell7• 3 months ago

You’re getting open source and free software mixed up. As I said, Open Source was a reformulation of Free Software to make it more business-friendly. Free Software is fundamentally a moral stance (it is wrong to prevent sharing); Open Source is fundamentally a pragmatic stance (building software is better when it is publicly collaborative).

engeljohnb9• 3 months ago

Why is everyone in this thread ignoring the fact that the world already had this debate 30 years ago, so the OSI published a document clearly specifying what is and isn't Open Source?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Open_Source_Definition

It doesn't say anything about collaborative development.

JimDabell7• 3 months ago

I’m well aware of the OSD, but we are talking about social norms, not distribution terms.

Direct from the OSI:

The conferees believed the pragmatic, business-case grounds that had motivated Netscape to release their code illustrated a valuable way to engage with potential software users and developers, and convince them to create and improve source code by participating in an engaged community. The conferees also believed that it would be useful to have a single label that identified this approach and distinguished it from the philosophically- and politically-focused label “free software.” Brainstorming for this new label eventually converged on the term “open source”, originally suggested by Christine Peterson.

— https://opensource.org/about/history-of-the-open-source-init...

“Participating in an engaged community” has been an intrinsic part of Open Source from the beginning.

ekianjo2• 3 months ago

There's now a chat group. People with no patience are angry and now you have to babysit them, have your own one-on-ones. There's a "community" now that you're responsible for. You never signed up for this

of course YOU signed up for this. There is no well kept secret that this is going on. It should be a surprise for no one.

maleldil2• 3 months ago

I don't understand. Is your argument that because these expectations exist, anyone working on open-source has to abide by them automatically?

ekianjo2• 3 months ago

anyone working on open-source has to abide by them automatically?

If you dont want to abide by these standards, keep your code for yourself, I guess?

omnifischer• 3 months ago

Often people get emotional and try to baby sit (new and users that don't want to learn basics). Having a disjoint but strict, timely, disinterested connection with support forums is great. One of the great examples is coreboot or MrChromebox. He replies only when necessary.

GaryBluto2• 3 months ago

No "community". No politics. No Code of Conduct. No pull requests or issues. No wiki. No core team.

Sounds like paradise. I feel there are too many "communities" these days that exist to the detriment to the project at hand. I'd even go as far to say that I cannot think of a single time a "community" has aided an open source project in any way.

locknitpicker4• 3 months ago

Sounds like paradise.

It sounds like paradise if you are not open to accepting any contribution or even feedback to fix even egregious problems with the project.

That's fine if your goal is to maximize control at the expense of quality. But for that I wonder if FLOSS is what you are actually looking for.

GaryBluto2• 3 months ago

molticrystal's suggestion of politely e-mailing contributions would work.

ranger_danger3• 3 months ago

I think this is exactly what the article is about though... open source does not imply open community.

For many, I have noticed that they only post the source of their projects in case it's useful to others, but that ultimately they are only writing it for themselves and aren't interested in building a community around it, or trying to make it more "quality."

tap-snap-or-nap• 3 months ago

until Jia Tan comes for a rescue.

opan• 3 months ago

I thought this was going to be about the widespread issue of free software projects trying to make you use Discord to discuss or report things. There was a week or two where I saw people expressing interest in moving to other things, but that already seems to have died down. I assume they all gave up and went back to Discord after all.

qingcharles• 3 months ago

Every open source project I look at right now uses Discord, to my chagrin. Discord isn't totally awful, but it's ephemeral and requires a huge bloated web app.

ranger_danger3• 3 months ago

Doubly frustrating is that I can't even use Discord if I wanted to. Every time I try to make an account, it gets banned or phone-walled almost immediately afterwards. This has been a known problem with them for years with many people, and even if you try to appeal your ban, you just get "our automated system is working properly, goodbye."

ocdtrekkie• 3 months ago

I certainly don't think people should feel obligated to support random Internet people but often the reasons people like these open venues is the low friction of a community member offering up something genuinely useful. Be clear what you do and don't want and will and won't do, doesn't mean turning off the tools is the solution.

Personally someone using code I wrote or reporting a bug feels motivating to me, it'll probably push me to do something I myself benefit from. But I also am not afraid to tell someone no.

satisfice• 3 months ago

This is only even an issue if your repo is unusually popular. I put repos out that I am excited about but almost no one else seems to care.

I don’t want the contributions of strangers and no one seems to want to contribute anyway. I open sourced it just to make a place for someone to find it and fork it if they please.

Are there really people out there who don’t realize its okay not to do unpaid labor for randos?

MathMonkeyMan• 3 months ago

Yes, it's often the randos who feel this way.

cyanydeez• 3 months ago

Obviously everyone knows the solution: just make bots talk to other bots and we can all go be ethereal senescence somewhere offscreen.

Open source does not imply open community

Related Stories