He has a right to do anything he wants with hit source, but Open Source is nothing more than a license. We had GPL 2 before there was github. All you had to do is either deliver the source with your software, or make the source available upon request, even if it's by snail-mail.
My only exception to this article is the section, "People underestimate what open source costs from the maintainer side. It’s not just writing code. It’s issues, pull requests, discussions, people demanding things from you for free. I got spammed like crazy. And now with AI, spamming a maintainer is so easy: low effort issues, generated pull requests, and every single one of them takes a bit of your time and energy"
This is all self-inflicted. Don't take Issues. Don't take PRs. Make the repo read-only to everyone but you. There's zero effort, unless you're planning on keeping all the source on your computer and never push it anywhere. Well, I guess, in that case you're saving yourself from doing a push.
So if you don't want to do all that stuff, that's fine. You don't have to. But don't pretend the only alternative is to close the source.
100% agree. Especially since you wouldn't have to start taking his word for the things he explicitly lays out in this article, that previously were checkable at no additional cost to any party
I thought that GitHub supports some sort of locking repo, such as not allowing PRs? As X allows comments from accounts mentioned in tweet.
We also had open source before we had GPL, that is how UNIX got widespread anyway, in source tapes.
Amiga had the Fish disks, PC had all the whateverware variants during its MS-DOS days.
8 bits naturally had the magazine listings to type in.
Yep. People seem to have forgotten about the cathedral vs bazaar. Somehow in many people's minds open source implies bazaar but both cathedral and bazaar are both free/open source. The author just wants to go to a cathedral style project, which is perfectly understandable. There's no need to make it closed source.
I mostly agree, but from experience, when you readonly your repository, you encourage a bunch of forks, then people ping you in those based on git blame, and many other out-of-band contacts. But I think that cat is out of the bag anyway.
A terminal is critical software, you type passwords into it, it sees all the output, you need to trust it, so while I'm sad to find out about this project only today, the closed-source is indeed a deal-breaker for me