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Sunsetting Jazzband
- zahlman 8mo agoUnfortunate. > 60% of maintainers are still unpaid. That's actually not as bad as I would have guessed.
- VladVladikoff 8mo agoYeah, I had the same thought. Expected it to be like 95%.
- tux3 8mo agoWait, y'all are getting paid?
- japhyr 8mo agoI'd be curious to know what portion of that 40% makes any meaningful income from their open source work. I would guess that most of those people are being paid a small appreciation amount for the work they're doing, not something resembling a living wage.
- johncolanduoni 8mo agoThey may be including maintainers who are explicitly employed to maintain the respective projects (e.g. some RedHat employees). This is not common, but not vanishingly rare either.
- shablulman 8mo ago[dead]
- benatkin 8mo agoThe Register post about the Slopocalypse to me feels tongue in cheek while this post seemingly takes it at face value. What's happening on GitHub is a mixed bag. I love what AI is doing to Ghostty.
- BeefySwain 8mo agoWhat is happening with Ghostty?
- righthand 8mo agohttps://github.com/ghostty-org/ghostty/tree/main/.agents/commands https://github.com/ghostty-org/ghostty/tree/main/.agents/com... Is my best guess. The GP is perhaps referring to ghostty repo adding helper files for Llm agents to operate as a cursory look at issues to placate issue submitters.
- benatkin 8mo agoNo, that Ghostty is improving much more rapidly than it would be without agentic coding, In spite of a painful transition.
- slopinthebag 8mo agoHave you listened to Mitchell Hashimoto talk about how he uses AI? He is not a vibe coder by any definition of the term.
- UqWBcuFx6NV4r 8mo agoNobody said “vibe coder” here.
- slopinthebag 8mo agoWe both did.
- slopinthebag 8mo agoYou mean when AI caused the Ghostty maintainer to close PRs to outsiders?
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- iqihs 8mo agois it unrealistic to think the companies that benefit from orgs such as this could donate a fraction of a percent of their wealth to keep them going? the responsibility always seems to fall most on those with the least resources.
- idle_zealot 8mo agoThe decision of the market seems pretty clear. We've been able to co-operate and build a software commons for decades, iterating on and improving shared infrastructure and solutions to problems common and niche. The work done for these commons, though, benefits everyone, and that's a hard sell for a profit-driven organization. So the commons are enriched with a) volunteers b) brief windows in which corporate decision makers are driven by ideology and good intentions, where those decisions carry momentum or license obligations (see Android, and how Google tries to claw it back) c) corporations attempting to shape the larger landscape or commoditize their complement, see Facebook's work on React, or contributions to the Linux kernel Of the above, only (a) or rarely and temporarily (b) are interested in collective wellbeing. Most of the labor and resources go into making moats and doing the bare minimum to keep the shared infrastructure alive. Now companies selling LLM coding agents enter the scene, promising to eliminate their customers' dependence on the commons, and whatever minimal obligations they had to support it. Why use a standard solution when what used to be a library can now be generated on the fly and be part of your moat? Spot a security bug? Have an agent diagnose and fix it. No need to contribute to any upstream. Hell, no upstream would even accept whatever the LLM made without a bunch of cleanup and massaging to get it to conform with their style guides and standards. Open source, free software, they're fundamentally about code. The intended audience for such code is machine and human. They're not compatible with a development cycle where craft is not a consideration and code is not meant to be read and understood. That is all to say: yes, it is unrealistic to expect companies to donate anything to the commons if they can find any other avenue. They prefer a future where computer programs are purchased by the token from model providers to one where they might have to unintentionally help out a competitor.
- indymike 8mo ago> Now companies selling LLM coding agents enter the scene, promising to eliminate their customers' dependence on the commons, and whatever minimal obligations they had to support it. This is misguided. Maintenance of LLM code has a far greater cost than generating it. > They prefer a future where computer programs are purchased by the token from model providers to one where they might have to unintentionally help out a competitor. I don't think that's even a thought. The thought is that "no one can tell me no".
- grim_io 8mo agoJazzband have done the world a lot of good. They deserve better.
- sc68cal 8mo agoJazzband maintained some incredible Django packages and tools that made it possible for me to build a system at my $JOB that would have been impossible to do on my own. It is a true tragedy of the commons situation where I was expected do more with less, and I didn't have the ability to contribute back/donate anywhere near the value that these projects provided to $JOB or myself. I did contribute personally, but it's very clear how all of this value has been extracted and used by large companies to build higher and higher walls for themselves, and none of the people that actually make any of this work get more than crumbs.
- UqWBcuFx6NV4r 8mo agoBy this point, this take is old to the point of being tiresome. People should get what the deal is with open-source maintainership at this point. They should’ve gotten it back when Jazzband started. Nothing has changed since then. If you don’t want big companies using your stuff and not pay for it, don’t publish OSS. If you have some expectation that Google is going to write you a fat check, put it in the license—even if it’s practically unenforceable, it’s loads more than what 99% of OSS projects do right now. If people go into OSS maintainer positions expecting anything other than what has time and time again happened…it’s like that little comic of the guy poking a stick into his bike wheel spokes and falling over. The implication that OSS maintainers get nothing for their time is also laughable. If you were doing it for the money you wouldn’t be doing it in the first place. If they actually cared about making the world a better place and wanted to volunteer their time toward it they should go donate down at the soup kitchen. The reality is not everyone is so financially focused, but that shouldn’t be mistaken for altruism. It’s more that some people get their rocks off through other means. The reality is that OSS maintainers often find that they’re more financially focused than they thought they were—the novelty of their code running at Google wears off, the novelty of microcelebrity wears off, etc—and they get tired of it.
- camgunz 8mo agoIt was an insane mistake to disdain the GPL.
- mey 8mo agoI don't know how many maintainers that are impacted by this, or what they are getting from Jazzband (I was not previously familiar), but the Apache foundation may be something to look into. https://apache.org/ https://apache.org/
- comet_browser 8mo agoJazzband's model was interesting precisely because it tried to solve the bus factor problem by distributing maintainership across a community. The fact that it's sunsetting suggests the problem runs deeper than just individual maintainer burnout. The real gap is that there's no natural mechanism for projects that are critical infrastructure for many companies to capture even a tiny fraction of the value they create. pip, Django, and the whole ecosystem that Jazzband helped steward are worth billions in aggregate business value. Their maintenance costs a few thousand dollars a year in volunteer time. I don't think licensing changes alone fix this. Companies have legal teams that can route around them. What might actually work: large package registries (PyPI, npm) implementing a voluntary but strongly encouraged funding mechanism where companies self-report their usage and contribute to a foundation pool. It would need to be opt-in and friction-free, but even 10% adoption from mid-sized companies would transform the economics.
- WhyNotHugo 8mo ago> Jazzband's model was interesting precisely because it tried to solve the bus factor problem by distributing maintainership across a community. The fact that it's sunsetting suggests the problem runs deeper than just individual maintainer burnout. Indeed, but it also failed due to the same reason: a bus factor of 1 in terms of who administrates the whole thing. Each project could have multiple maintainers, but Jazzband itself (e.g.: the infrastructure, org, etc) had a single person responsible, and this didn't scale. I don't mean to bash on the person who took charge on this BTW, I'm merely describing the situation. I greatly appreciate the enormous effort taken during so many years!
- vova_hn2 8mo ago> Jazzband was always a one-roadie operation. People asked for more roadies and offered to help over the years, and I tried a number of times to make it work – but it never stuck. Not sure what exactly prevented him from accepting more people into the role of "roadies"...
- rtpg 8mo agoThe level of trust required is immense. We’re talking about a position where you get the keys to the kingdom to a very large number of projects I would say that having roadie level access is equivalent to having access to Django core. I have never seen a recent Django project that isn’t pulling something from jazzband Despite this I think it’s important to highlight that even in that world jazzband had a lot of infra so that projects could do things like releases cleanly and safely (we aren’t doing direct project releases to pypi but going through jazzband infra to do the release). So release maintainers have a lot less access despite releases “coming from” Jazzband
- vova_hn2 8mo ago> The level of trust required Maybe it could be mitigated by having some kind of council and requiring m out of n signatures to do anything? I know that people on HN hate Bitcoin, so I'm always a bit vary to use it as an example. But I think that in such cases having something similar to Bitcoin multisig could help.
- rtpg 8mo agoThat requires a lot of infra that isn’t built into _any_ of our tooling. It’s not so much about decision making as it is about the practical reality that people at that level basically need at least read access to a lot of secrets. You could say “maybe jazzband can infra its way out of those problems” but that’s a looooot of work! “N out of M consensus on making a GitHub API request to set who is a maintainer” * every single action roadies need to do It’s not just about bad actors either. Imagine a jazzband roadie getting credentials stolen via some npm-y attack. Obviously this problem exists in the project in the current form but _that problem gets worse just onboarding people_
- UqWBcuFx6NV4r 8mo agoBad smells were coming from Jazzband from well before people started churning out vibe-coded PRs. Jannis should’ve let this blog post sit for a few days before publishing it. The post basically says “why is Jazzband shutting down? AI! It’s AI’s fault! Also here’s my little rant about it being trained on open-source code!”, but he then proceeds to walk things back a little bit, “well actually it started a whole lot earlier”. Jazzband’s mismanagement wasn”t the butterfly flapping its wings that AI turned into something unsustainable. It was broken regardless, beyond the usual “oh the maintainers are burnt out”. It’s obvious that he’s got a more philosophical bee in his bonnet about AI, and is attributing more of Jazzband’s demise to it than can really be justified. All I’ll say is, there’s a reason that Django Commons now exists.
- tacitusarc 8mo agoOne proposed strategy to try and deal with this. https://freeasinweekend.org/ https://freeasinweekend.org/
- markandrewj 8mo agoWow, this is unfortunate and a loss for the Python community. I have been impressed with the quality of everything under Jazzband.