The social contract between Open Source contributors and users is broken.

This isn't new. It's been this way maybe for decades. Since the use of Open Source software really took off, it's gotten worse and worse. And now having carefully avoided dating this article, I'll date it by saying; AI has taken this fragile state of decay and shattered it.

Maintainers and contributors who were already at a breaking point are leaving Open Source entirely. Or, to survive, they're changing the way they treat their software and their users. The classic philosophy of "Open Source is for Everyone" is being upended, in favor of a new creed.

"Open Source is for my Peers"

The overwhelming failure that is open source

Let's go back a few decades. It's the 2000s, and Open Source has already existed for a long time, you've just never heard of it. You're about to hear of it, though, because a sea change is coming.

The early 2000s and before were dominated by large commercial software middleware providers. If you're old enough, you may even remember having to pay for a compiler before Microsoft personally killed the compiler industry.

If you were a developer, however, you almost definitely already had heard of Open Source. You were probably pretty excited about it, in fact. Open Source alternatives to expensive paid middleware were often much better. And, if you did have an issue, you could go in and just fix it yourself. Maybe you'd send it back upstream as a gift to the team behind it. Before, doing something like that would take emails between four levels of management and company liaisons to get on the roadmap to being fixed, after a few meetings of course.

You probably couldn't convince your manager. Open Source was scary, new, and untested. And, we care about reliable trusted solutions here thankyouverymuch. Linux? Don't be ridiculous. We already have an eight year Windows Server support contract.

This changed. By the late 2000s, Open Source and Linux specifically had almost definitively won. In 2009, Red Hat's market capitalization overtook Sun. Remember Sun Microsystems? They made Solaris! No? Exactly. And as the likes of Red Hat and Canonical started gaining traction, others followed suit. The hope was that now that everyone is using Open Source, obviously a small donation from everyone who depended on it would more than cover the development costs.

The biggest appeal of Open Source for companies wasn't that it was good software. It was that it was free labor. Some money materialized, but never to the degree that could cover paying the developers. Over time, Open Source became the most important cornerstone of our modern technology infrastructure, without those doing the labor of actually writing the software getting paid.

Disorienting time-skip during which many important events happen

I've built a lot of things in my life, Red. Useful things, profitable things, 'smart' things... Everything I've built, it's all been very helpful and courteous and charming and... happy to serve. ...I can comfortably say I've done my part, contributing to the global GDP.

David Ashur, of the Devil - Episode 1

So, it's 2026. You're an Open Source developer. That is to say, most likely, you're a developer who contributes to an Open Source project in your free time. Because your company doesn't pay you to develop Open Source.

In fact, you may even be a maintainer of some important foundation of the JavaScript ecosystem. Nobody's ever heard of your package, of course, even though it's getting like 5 bazillion downloads per day, of course.

You know this is a problem. Everyone knows this is a problem. Everyone you talk to agrees this is a problem. Nothing changes. You don't have the power to change this, despite the claims of some. You post XKCD 2347 to each-other and laugh. XKCD 2347 was posted 6 years ago.

AI happens.

Let's not go into details. You know AI happened. Everyone knows AI happened. You can't walk down the street without seeing AI has happened. You go to your favorite local cafe and see AI has happened all over their signs and posters. AI has happened all over your social media feeds, over every single TV channel, and probably it's happened all over at least one of your treasured Computing Devices too.

And then, AI starts happening all over your Open Source.

When in Rome

Suddenly, on every single project you're contributing to, AI is happening very rapidly. Thousands of bug reports streaming in, thousands of pull requests too. Now, pull requests were already an issue. Nobody likes reviewing pull requests so they've been getting a bit stale. This, however, is on another level.

This would be fine if it were decent code. Having so many good contributions that you don't have time to look through them all is, quite frankly, a good problem to have. Unfortunately this isn't the problem you're having. You're getting first-time contributors producing code that, once you look at it, is complete nonsense or disastrously unmaintainable. AI has happened all over these pull requests. You suspect for some of these, at no point in the process was a human ever involved.

This is bad. Of course. Because it's more work for less gain. Work you were not being paid for in the first place. And at this point, since everyone has AI happening to them, tensions are flaring. The AI generated pull requests become not just bad, they become radioactive.

Then it gets worse. AI happens to one of your maintainers.

Given that a lot of AI is happening, some people decide; if AI is going to happen to me anyways, I may as well use it myself. A person you respect a lot has decided that, actually, a little AI is okay. This is now your problem. Because they've submitted a pull request where they used a little AI.

You decide, naively, that fine we all agree that the flood of garbage is bad. But, you're not going to impose what tools your contributors can or cannot use. They're also not being paid, and are doing the work, so you really have no right to tell them what to do.

Within two hours you're on the front page of Hacker News. Within a day tech enthusiast YouTubers are speaking breathlessly about your radical pro-AI stance. Within a day and five minutes the first issues get submitted to your issue tracker.

You now have significantly more work you're not being paid for than you used to have.

Okay let's drop this narrative device

This exact story is happening all across Open Source, repeatedly. It's been happening for the last few years increasingly more frequently. The phrase "vibe coding", which initially referred to getting an LLM to write all code for you without any human involvement, now means "any code where AI was involved in some way".

Open Source has essentially split into three camps. And let's be fair here, not everyone falls cleanly into one or in fact any of these camps. This is a rhetorical device, bear with me here.

The first camp is people who think that completely AI generated code, without any human involvement at any point, is fine actually. I do not think these people are holding an opinion I find particularly serious so let's skip over those folks.

The second is people who have decided to ban all AI use altogether in the projects they manage. I have tremendous respect for these people and think their opinions are both coherent and well-founded. I want to stress that despite what I am about to say, I have absolutely no issue with people taking this stance on their projects. This stance is typically taken by maintainer consensus, and if the maintainers of a project say "No AI here thank you very much.", then that should be respected.

The third camp are those who say they're not going to ban AI tooling, if that's what their maintainers want to use. If what their maintainers do when producing good code is use AI, then so be it. And you, dear user, do not get to tell us what to do. Because you're not paying us. If you want bespoke human-written code, pay humans to do so.

This position is particularly unpopular with camp four.

Camp four: The Phantom Menace

Ban AI [...] or we will kill you and your children.

Online comment (translated)

You may have noticed I said "three camps", and now I'm introducing a fourth. That's intentional and very incendiary. I hope to get many angry comments about this to drive engagement. Camp four is not part of Open Source. Camp four has no coherent single opinion. Some are extremely anti-AI. Some are so pro-AI you'd have to pry them off their OpenAI subscription by force.

Camp four is the users of Open Source software that do not contribute or donate. Not simply to a specific project, but to the Open Source canon at large. There are many different acts which count as contributing to Open Source, and the vast majority of them do not include writing code. Camp four is doing none of those things, and does not only include people, but also companies, entities.

Almost all users of Open Source fall into camp four. And camp four has very strong opinions about how you, dear maintainer, should be writing your software. The software they're not paying you to write, of course. Because, it's running on their system, and that entitles them to a say, of course.

And they're correct. They are the people you're actually writing the software for, right?

Right?

XKCD 1022

For the avoidance of any doubt, this post is not related to the quality of any Anthropic products, we are just thanking them for sending patches to a project developed almost entirely by volunteers.

Many companies do not send patches.

@FFmpeg Twitter

Using AI as an example here is, if anything, simply a framing device. It doesn't really matter. I'm sure you, like most people, have very strong opinions on its use one way or another. If you talk to me for more than a few minutes, you'll know I have no end of very strong opinions about AI too. But it, really, just, doesn't matter.

This exact same sequence of events has played out many times over many different battlefields. Open Source has failed, overwhelmingly, to be a sustainable ecosystem. The worst thing that can happen to you is that your Open Source project gets successful. Maintainers are exhausted, and falling back on something more palatable.

That fallback is simple; the software they're writing is not for you. It's for them. And, it's for their peers. The people who do the work. The writing of code, the testing of bugs, the maintaining of social spaces, the system administrators and, indeed, those who do not have the skills but contribute back in other ways. The philosophy of the new Open Source is "He who does not work, neither shall he eat."

And even if you are not a peer, then if the mutual contract is upheld, you will be treated with respect and grace. Your opinions will be seen and considered. You will have a place in Open Source, too; a seat at the table.

As a guest. A valued and appreciated guest, don't get me wrong. Open Source developers are thrilled if nothing else when people use and appreciate software they've made. So, you get to use the software. For free, of course, with no strings attached. But no strings attached goes both ways.

At the potluck of Open Source, you are being generously treated to free food. If you break the social contract by complaining about the taste, you will be politely asked to leave.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED “AS IS”, WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.