alt Hacker NewsI have come to a similar realization recently - its what I call "Take it home OSS" - i.e. fork freely, modify it to your liking using AI coding agents, and stop waiting for upstream permissions. We seem to be gravitating towards a future where there is not much need to submit PRs or issues, except for critical bugs or security fixes. It's as if OSS is raw material, and your fork is your product.
Replies
This is very shortsighted and it’s like polishing gun to shoot your foot with it.
If it’s "take it home OSS" and "there is not much need to submit PRs or issues" then why would anybody submit PRs and issues for "for critical bugs or security fixes"? If they have fix and it works for them, they’re fine, afterall.
And while we’re at it, why would anybody share anything? It’s just too much hassle. People will either complain or don’t bother at all.
I think that after few years, when LLM coding would be an old boring thing everybody’s used to and people will learn few hard lessons because of not sharing, we’ll come to some new form of software collaboration because it’s more effective than thinking me and LLM are better than me and LLM and thousands or millions people and LLMs.
Won't be much "raw material" left before long, if everyone takes that view.
This has always been the case, and is really the main practical advantage of open source. Contributing code back is an act of community service which people do not always have time for. The main issue is that over time, other people will contribute back their own acts of community service, which may be bug fixes or features that you want to take advantage of. As upstream and your own fork diverge, it will take more and more work to update your patches. So if you intend to follow upstream, it benefits you to send your patches back.
Recently I've been air-dropped into such a legacy project at work in order to save a cybersecurity-focused release date. Millions of lines of open-source code checked in a decade ago prior to the Subversion-to-Git migration, then patched everywhere to the point where diffs for the CVEs don't apply and we're not even sure what upstream versions best describe the forks.
By the end, the project manager begged me to turn off my flamethrower, as I was ripping it all out for a clean west manifest to tagged versions and stacks of patches. "Take it home OSS" is like take-out food: if you don't do your chores and leave it out for months or years on the kitchen counter, the next person to enter the apartment is going to puke.