I think there is an underlying root cause to how we treat Open Source, and it's similar to the IT "cost center vs value creator" problem: Open source packages a

I think there is an underlying root cause to how we treat Open Source, and it's similar to the IT "cost center vs value creator" problem: Open source packages are treated as consumer goods, and creators in turn will engage with that by marketing them as consumable products. Many of these things which are distributed as packages are actually code snippets. They could be maintained in the form of a Stack Overflow answer to copy-paste into your code. The question-answer system exposes the code to the necessary competitive evaluation: a malicious answer soon gets downvoted. When the packaging metaphor is laden over them, the whole chain of responsibility lapses back to the vendor-consumer model. And this works when packages are large and take pains to reduce their own dependencies, even if it means common functions get duplicated across different packages. But prolific authors currently are rewarded by being vendors of undersized packages: they enjoy large download numbers, Github stars, and so on. Without any kind of curation to impose friction on this process, they can do the wrong thing for a very long period and get zero feedback indicating that their actions create a problem. And on the consuming side nobody pays a lick of attention when the prompt says it's going to install 50 things with cute-but-opaque names. If they are under a page of code each, you could probably just print the code. When I create projects now, I tend to grab some packaged code to start with, but apart from a few to do core functions like I/O I will treat them as placeholders and seek ways of reworking the code to make myself the sole maintainer. The alternative is to be a software consumer and to complain like a consumer - i.e. in a largely powerless fashion - when other people's code doesn't do what I want.