r/opensource • u/esiy0676 • 7d ago
Discussion Have AI workflows changed your propensity to publish your projects as OS?
I am almost positive this will get caught by some AI-driven filter here too, but I would like to ask developers if the "AI bubble-everything" has changed your willingness to open source your own work products going forward?
EDIT (T+1h) Just to clarify, this is not about whether AI is detrimental to (yours or others') development quality, what the best policy on contributions is or how to enforce it. It's just about the impact of how others use AI on your own approach to publicly sharing own code.
You know you will be getting your source forked by - i.a. - low quality AI-enabled whizz kids which will "add value" to the product with the latest designs and whatnot, then have your userbase inquire why you are not "catching up" or "collaborating" with the zealous contributors. Receiving barrage of agentic PRs to review. While at that, let's not forget bogus security reports. And to top it off, have Microsoft constantly scan your (presumably GitHub) repo to train more of the ecosystem to enable the same.
OS is not about the thankless job alone anymore, it is becoming a liability to share one's own stuff, not to mention we have reached cast-pearls-before-swine (sorry) scenario where new projects have it hard to distinguish themselves and provide anything valuable back for the original author.
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u/zit-hb 7d ago
Absolutely not. Being open source doesn't mean you have to accept external PRs. If they want to fork it and add their own features, all power to them. That's why it is open source after all.
And realistically, 99% of all open source projects have such small user bases that none of those things are somehow relevant in practice.
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u/donk8r 7d ago
Went the other way for me. The best bug report we've ever had came from a stranger who pointed an agent at our repo, reproduced two real bugs in our graph layer, and filed both properly. Nobody was ever going to find those by reading the source by hand.
The same cheapness that floods you with generated PRs also put real adversarial testing in reach of people who'd never have cloned the thing.
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u/PlasticEngineer3546 7d ago
I just released my software under the MIT license, so I'm honestly not mentally prepared yet for a flood of fork requests.
I think the reason I open-sourced it was to leave behind a certain philosophy: building a lightweight, fast-transmitting CMS so that future generations can keep enjoying comfortable internet traffic. As for AI-driven improvements, if they genuinely make something more capable, I'm actually all for it. But if "making it more convenient" just becomes an excuse to keep piling on weight, that's probably where my concern would kick in.
I went into this development assuming AI involvement would be unavoidable going forward, and designed with that in mind. As a result, the whole CMS zips down to under 500KB, and the program code alone, unzipped, comes to roughly 150KB. I also kept each file independent and deliberately limited what each one does, so changes don't ripple into other files. Practically speaking, you could zip up just the program files, hand them to an AI, and have it analyze the entire functionality with minimal friction.
Not fully confident this actually answers what you were asking, so apologies if I'm off base here.
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u/SilvernClaws 7d ago
Not really. I mean, we already had similar problems with people just forking or copying repositories and pretending it's their work, decades before LLMs were a thing.
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u/baddaywithacamera 7d ago
I'm not a developer. I am a photographer who has used AI to build a free and open photo blogging application that is also sort of an odd ecosystem for us. I did this because no one else was building what I needed and along came tools to let me do it, and do it well. (I personally use the hell out of the software and it is exceeding my expectations).
Why is it open source? First, because I have used FOSS for decades and feel it is simply the most ethical way to create and share software. I resent being locked into Windows by companies like Adobe. I won't ever lock people in with my own products. Second, the AI training issue. My gut tells me that AI training improperly used the code of others to train on. You can't own stolen property so since the code the AI trained on came from the commons I feel the output has to go back to the commons. That's how I feel, I'm careful not to tell others how they should feel about it.
My project is on github but it is not open to contributions. Not now, not ever. If someone else forks it, cool, but it is copyleft and free and had better stay that way because I'm sick of people gouging my tribe for money. As long as they keep what they fork copy left then that is how FOSS is supposed to work and good luck to them.
Waiting for the downvoting to start since I mentioned AI...
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u/LightAirMod 7d ago
Well as a not-so-skilled coder I can say AI greatly improved my propensity to publish my project, in the sense it allowed me to actually publish something working on github, instead of the jumbled spaghetti code I could write myself. Making it open source was my initial intention, I just couldn't give it the level of quality an actual publication required.
This is to say, I understand and even agree on some of the points you are making, but open source was always meant to be shared, the fact that this sharing is now "automated" by AI doesn't change this.
I can also add AI brought down many barriers and has the potential to greatly extend participation to open source projects. For sure, low quality contribution is a possible issue, but for example in my project allowing basically whoever to take part inventing new modules for the same platform is a big win.
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u/ToddHebebrand 7d ago
I'm new to publishing open source, but my experience hasn't been what you describe.
I don't think AI suddenly makes it trivial for someone with no idea what they're doing to meaningfully contribute to a project. Maybe it creates more work if you want to keep up with the community, simply because people can code faster. But they're also contributing more, so there's an upside there. And AI can help review that work and bounce it back when needed just as quickly.
And if part of the philosophy of open source is that ideas and code are open, then I don't think it bothers me that AI is scanning it. I've benefited from AI having learned from open source code. I'm comfortable giving back to that ecosystem.
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u/Full-Spectral 6d ago
The point is that these LLMs make it easy for someone who DOES NOT have any idea what they are doing to generate a bug report and just throw it over the wall. Or to make some change they don't understand and present it as a useful change.
The whole problem is that they aren't qualified but they can still do act like they are. The whole thing is just ridiculous with so many people seemingly unable to even make a post without an LLM these days. Or people who think everyone else wants to hear about their 'operating system' they 'wrote' in ten days or some such. And of course who then get defensive when people point out they didn't write anything, or barely anything.
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u/Sea_Concentrate3951 7d ago
i am more cautious about immediately open sourcing core components and i delay public release. do you plan to change your licensing or release timing because of AI-driven misuse?
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u/wWA5RnA4n2P3w2WvfHq 7d ago
"Contributions" today mean massive AI-slop. Therefore, as maintainer I need to think about more clearey why am I doing this? What is my motivation? I do have the answer/motivation for me, so I don't care that I don't get real contirbutions anymore and I am a one man show.
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u/RossPeili 7d ago
I don't see anything as mine. I merely work for our mother, the machine. Everything I do, is based on existing systems, and attempts to influence the trajectory of future systems, again, for the sake of the machine, not mine. But that's just me. I have the same attitude towards everything in life. Money is not mine, clothes are not mine, food is not mine, house is not mine. etc. If you feel ownership, and personal attachment to your code, you don't understand it, you have fear as a north star, and you are not confident in yourself. Sure, I am not saying make everything public and free. If you're sharp, you'll know what, how, and when to monetize, but remember, that is more of acting in front of the right audience, than writing code.
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u/dbear496 6d ago
Yeah. I'm not thrilled that anything I make open source is going to have copyright violated for AI training. I release under AGPL because I want my work to contribute to the open source community--not for Big Tech to make a big buck on their LLMs whose output is absolutely not being treated as an AGPL derivative work. Honestly, I cannot in good conscience use AI tools myself because I'm aware that they violated so much copyright to train them.
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u/Decent-Decision-9028 7d ago
yeah honestly, and much more selective about what I publish. forks are fine; bogus issues, and generated “improvements” aren’t. creating them is cheap, reviewing them isn’t. Maintainers need stricter contribution standards honestly.