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Call me old but there was a time when “open source project” meant “I had a problem, this is my solution, if someone has the same problem then you are free to us

Call me old but there was a time when “open source project” meant “I had a problem, this is my solution, if someone has the same problem then you are free to use my solution”. These days is more: - building personal brand - showcasing your skills - trying to outsmart somebody else, often because they didn’t merge your pr - sometimes just having fun And if you work for big org it’s also often “this looks vaguely similar to one of our epics so let’s start using it and demand 24/7 support”

avaer 4mo ago
There was a time when web meant sharing your hobbies with supportive anonymous strangers, a time when crypto meant doing clever things with numbers. In my experience you can pretty much always bet on greed, money, and psychopathy to ruin anything that reaches beyond Dunbar's number. It's sad when your playground gets overrun by drug lords (metaphorically speaking); I don't really have an answer to that. It's my central trauma.
- deleted 4mo ago
  [deleted]
- marcus_holmes 4mo ago
  I found Mastodon, feels like usenet in about 1993. There are odd corners of the web that still work on RSS, and just have people sharing stuff. But yeah, the entire of mainstream internet discourse can be safely ignored. HN, though, I still like it here :)
  - avaer 4mo ago
    Thanks for the tip! I'm pretty jaded on social media but you gave me a spark of hope.
gkoberger 4mo ago
I imagine there's a similar same number of those style projects out there. However, the amount of devs have grown exponentially, and the number of non-niche problems without a solution have dramatically decreased.
Isamu 4mo ago
And there was a definite shift from sharing toward evangelism. For example C was shared, C++ was evangelized. The difference is the effort put into convincing people to adopt your stuff. Java for instance was mega evangelized, Sun thought it might reverse their fortunes. Linux was initially “here you go, hope it works for you” but then it attracted many people who decided to create an ecosystem around it.
fritzo 4mo ago
Dependency bloat and dependency bitrot have made solutions less permanent, have increased the maintenance burden. My ancient projects with zero dependencies still stand. But projects I built on shifting dependencies are rotting and cracking.
- singpolyma3 4mo ago
  Do the versions of the dependencies that you used no longer exist anywhere?
  - jonnyasmar 4mo ago
    Fair counter, and that's the right stance. The tax I'm pointing at is the implicit social one: feeling like you owe a response. Plenty of publishers get burned out before they figure out your model.
  - ryukoposting 4mo ago
    In my experience, the most common problem is that a dependency changes. It drops support for something, API changing, etc. If it's 3 dependencies deep, and one of the deps in the middle isn't maintained anymore, well...
  - em-bee 4mo ago
    they exist, but they are likely unmaintained, and may have known security issues. i have a project that suffers from that. the version of a library it is built with is old and unsecure, but the newer supported version has a completely different API that would require me to rewrite the code that uses the library. i had a second such case where i discovered a fork of the old version of the library which was still maintained. otherwise there too a rewrite would have been required.
- drnick1 4mo ago
  This is why is like pure C/C++ projects with zero dependencies beyond the standard library, and this is certainly what I do for my numerical work. If some external library is needed, the source files of the dependency are downloaded, compiled, and kept as part of the project itself, so that it can always be rebuilt and reused if necessary. Of course, depending on what you do, this may not be practical, although LLMs certainly have made it much easier to generate the dependencies in house, so to speak.
phyzix5761 4mo ago
Its also become lots of people demanding fixes but not many contributing them.
jonnyasmar 4mo ago
The framing assumes the ratio of "problem-and-solution" projects to "personal-brand" projects has shifted. I'd push back: I think the underlying ratio is roughly the same — what's shifted is what gets published. The work of running an open-source project (issue triage, security disclosures, contribution guidelines, CI, release cadence, dependency maintenance) is way higher than the work of solving the original problem. People with the "here's my private workflow tool" mindset increasingly don't publish at all because they can't afford that tax. Meanwhile, anyone seeking brand-building benefits IS willing to take it on, because the brand-building is the point. So the visible OSS landscape over-represents the brand category not because solution-sharing died, but because solution-sharing acquired a 10x maintenance overhead that most people now opt out of. I see it in my own dotfiles — full of small tools I'd happily share if "share" still meant "drop a gist." It doesn't, anymore.
- singpolyma3 4mo ago
  I still publish everything. If someone wants to come and ask me to do something they can happily find out I likely will not.
- david_allison 4mo ago
  > I'd happily share if "share" still meant "drop a gist." It doesn't, anymore. It still does. Feel free to use https://unmaintained.tech/ https://unmaintained.tech/ on your repo.
  - dlenski 4mo ago
    Love this. Gonna add it to a few of mine that are quasi abandoned because I'm too burned-out to wade back into them in any detail, per one of the categories described in the article.
- dullcrisp 4mo ago
  Do you all really have your random public git repos accidentally being used in production by Facebook? No one’s ever made one of my one-commit git repos a key component of corporate infrastructure. Or do you mean that the meaning of what it is to “publish” something has shifted?
d1l 4mo ago
15 years ago GitHub was a strong signal for like-minded devs who were of the “let me code and slide pizza under the door” variety. The signal became less meaningful over time so people started optimizing for other things…stars, whatever. Brand. I think the venn diagram of front end marketing types and the explosion of js frameworks probably was the driver for this. Now with vibed out projects everywhere it’s a real task to separate the wheat from the chaff. And I still use gh because I imagine those stars are still current in some markets but maybe I’m deluding myself. Or, Perhaps the invention of the rocket emoji most likely was the cause of this phenomenon.
- Gigachad 4mo ago
  The signal of quality for me is the number of contributors and the age of the repo. If I see a repo that's several years old and has many contributes over that time it's very likely a reputable project with some value. If I see a 1 month old repo with one user who has dumped the whole thing and then done nothing since, it's likely vibeslop that will be abandoned in a month.
  - dd8601fn 4mo ago
    I recently made this mistake. It was my own fault. Went looking for a thing, saw some Reddit chatter, decided to try it out. After all the setup and such I realized it was vibecoded and poorly designed. Just monster gaps they obviously didn’t think about and can’t realistically fix. I should have paid closer attention. Checked the repo… couple months old, no real activity after the first week or so, basically the only project on the account, issues were all unanswered references to the nasty gap in the design.
socalgal2 4mo ago
> And if you work for big org it’s also often “this looks vaguely similar to one of our epics so let’s start using it and demand 24/7 support” where do people get this idea? AFAICT it's made up.
spaqin 4mo ago
Mostly because CS career advice was always "have some personal projects to show off". Either fully single-person, or be a contributor. And over time, it has soaked some of the corporate, CV-driven development culture as well.
Aurornis 4mo ago
> Call me old but there was a time when “open source project” meant “I had a problem, this is my solution, if someone has the same problem then you are free to use my solution”. These days is more: - building personal brand - showcasing your skills - trying to outsmart somebody else, often because they didn’t merge your pr - sometimes just having fun Linux, MySQL, PostgreSQL, Apache, Python, most web browsers, and large swaths of server code used across the internet have been "open source projects" for years that were more than people sharing their solution as-is. Useful projects have always developed communities. Some people do try to make open source projects for exposure or resume content, but that's usually orthogonal to the projects that get enough traction to have to worry about maintainers disappearing. I think you're mixing two different concepts up
bruce511 4mo ago
You're not wrong, but the License used is critical here. If the code is indeed Open Source, with an OSS license, then you can use it as-is, or just learn from it and write-your-own. You might even fold it as-is into your app. Keep the code, but remove the dependence. Free Software on the other hand is a different animal. The GPL et al is viral. Doing any of the above with GPL software has consequences. Even learning and rewriting is risky- the rewrite better be more than just variable name changes. If you're old school, and you want to share on a "do what you like, I'm not turning this into my day job" basis, where you want folk to actually benefit, yhen I recommend an OSS license over a Free license. On the other hand if your target audience are other Free developers, then a Free license makes complete sense. And if you plan to commercialize your project down the road an aggressive Free license (like say AGPL) is a good choice. Ultimately your choice of license should match your goals.
- jraph 4mo ago
  Free software licenses and open source licenses are almost the same set, and the difference between the two is not copyleft: the GPL is OSI-approved. The difference is in the spirit, focus, philosophy: free software is concerned about user rights. And if you care about user rights, use a copyleft license to prevent someone from building a proprietary derivative, even if you are not turning it into your day job. Especially if you are not turning it into your day job, a copyfree license is more likely to atract corporate.
  - bruce511 4mo ago
    Exactly. If you care about "who" uses the code then Free software certainly helps to limit that. If all you want is to offer "here's some code, knock yourself out" then a license like MIT and BSD is generally more useful to more people.
- wging 4mo ago
  Many OSS licenses are also free software licenses, even if they are not viral and don't impose severe restrictions on the licensee in the way the GPL does. The MIT license, for example. "Free software" and "GPL" are not synonymous, even GNU doesn't say so. See https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#SoftwareLicenses https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#SoftwareLicen...
xtracto 4mo ago
You forgot the Open Core trap: Company wants to get customers so it lures them into an almost-useful "open source" application that happens to be unisable when wanting to do anything serious.
whateverboat 4mo ago
So what you are saying is that it has now become a professional industry rather than hobby stuff?
lofaszvanitt 4mo ago
This is how programmers use to force to work for companies if they want to earn a living. Time to fight back.

avaer 4mo ago

There was a time when web meant sharing your hobbies with supportive anonymous strangers, a time when crypto meant doing clever things with numbers. In my experience you can pretty much always bet on greed, money, and psychopathy to ruin anything that reaches beyond Dunbar's number. It's sad when your playground gets overrun by drug lords (metaphorically speaking); I don't really have an answer to that. It's my central trauma.

deleted 4mo ago
[deleted]
marcus_holmes 4mo ago
I found Mastodon, feels like usenet in about 1993. There are odd corners of the web that still work on RSS, and just have people sharing stuff. But yeah, the entire of mainstream internet discourse can be safely ignored. HN, though, I still like it here :)
- avaer 4mo ago
  Thanks for the tip! I'm pretty jaded on social media but you gave me a spark of hope.

gkoberger 4mo ago

I imagine there's a similar same number of those style projects out there. However, the amount of devs have grown exponentially, and the number of non-niche problems without a solution have dramatically decreased.

Isamu 4mo ago

And there was a definite shift from sharing toward evangelism. For example C was shared, C++ was evangelized. The difference is the effort put into convincing people to adopt your stuff. Java for instance was mega evangelized, Sun thought it might reverse their fortunes. Linux was initially “here you go, hope it works for you” but then it attracted many people who decided to create an ecosystem around it.

fritzo 4mo ago

Dependency bloat and dependency bitrot have made solutions less permanent, have increased the maintenance burden. My ancient projects with zero dependencies still stand. But projects I built on shifting dependencies are rotting and cracking.

singpolyma3 4mo ago
Do the versions of the dependencies that you used no longer exist anywhere?
- jonnyasmar 4mo ago
  Fair counter, and that's the right stance. The tax I'm pointing at is the implicit social one: feeling like you owe a response. Plenty of publishers get burned out before they figure out your model.
- ryukoposting 4mo ago
  In my experience, the most common problem is that a dependency changes. It drops support for something, API changing, etc. If it's 3 dependencies deep, and one of the deps in the middle isn't maintained anymore, well...
- em-bee 4mo ago
  they exist, but they are likely unmaintained, and may have known security issues. i have a project that suffers from that. the version of a library it is built with is old and unsecure, but the newer supported version has a completely different API that would require me to rewrite the code that uses the library. i had a second such case where i discovered a fork of the old version of the library which was still maintained. otherwise there too a rewrite would have been required.
drnick1 4mo ago
This is why is like pure C/C++ projects with zero dependencies beyond the standard library, and this is certainly what I do for my numerical work. If some external library is needed, the source files of the dependency are downloaded, compiled, and kept as part of the project itself, so that it can always be rebuilt and reused if necessary. Of course, depending on what you do, this may not be practical, although LLMs certainly have made it much easier to generate the dependencies in house, so to speak.

phyzix5761 4mo ago

Its also become lots of people demanding fixes but not many contributing them.

jonnyasmar 4mo ago

The framing assumes the ratio of "problem-and-solution" projects to "personal-brand" projects has shifted. I'd push back: I think the underlying ratio is roughly the same — what's shifted is what gets published. The work of running an open-source project (issue triage, security disclosures, contribution guidelines, CI, release cadence, dependency maintenance) is way higher than the work of solving the original problem. People with the "here's my private workflow tool" mindset increasingly don't publish at all because they can't afford that tax. Meanwhile, anyone seeking brand-building benefits IS willing to take it on, because the brand-building is the point. So the visible OSS landscape over-represents the brand category not because solution-sharing died, but because solution-sharing acquired a 10x maintenance overhead that most people now opt out of. I see it in my own dotfiles — full of small tools I'd happily share if "share" still meant "drop a gist." It doesn't, anymore.

singpolyma3 4mo ago
I still publish everything. If someone wants to come and ask me to do something they can happily find out I likely will not.
david_allison 4mo ago
> I'd happily share if "share" still meant "drop a gist." It doesn't, anymore. It still does. Feel free to use https://unmaintained.tech/ https://unmaintained.tech/ on your repo.
- dlenski 4mo ago
  Love this. Gonna add it to a few of mine that are quasi abandoned because I'm too burned-out to wade back into them in any detail, per one of the categories described in the article.
dullcrisp 4mo ago
Do you all really have your random public git repos accidentally being used in production by Facebook? No one’s ever made one of my one-commit git repos a key component of corporate infrastructure. Or do you mean that the meaning of what it is to “publish” something has shifted?

d1l 4mo ago

15 years ago GitHub was a strong signal for like-minded devs who were of the “let me code and slide pizza under the door” variety. The signal became less meaningful over time so people started optimizing for other things…stars, whatever. Brand. I think the venn diagram of front end marketing types and the explosion of js frameworks probably was the driver for this. Now with vibed out projects everywhere it’s a real task to separate the wheat from the chaff. And I still use gh because I imagine those stars are still current in some markets but maybe I’m deluding myself. Or, Perhaps the invention of the rocket emoji most likely was the cause of this phenomenon.

Gigachad 4mo ago
The signal of quality for me is the number of contributors and the age of the repo. If I see a repo that's several years old and has many contributes over that time it's very likely a reputable project with some value. If I see a 1 month old repo with one user who has dumped the whole thing and then done nothing since, it's likely vibeslop that will be abandoned in a month.
- dd8601fn 4mo ago
  I recently made this mistake. It was my own fault. Went looking for a thing, saw some Reddit chatter, decided to try it out. After all the setup and such I realized it was vibecoded and poorly designed. Just monster gaps they obviously didn’t think about and can’t realistically fix. I should have paid closer attention. Checked the repo… couple months old, no real activity after the first week or so, basically the only project on the account, issues were all unanswered references to the nasty gap in the design.

socalgal2 4mo ago

> And if you work for big org it’s also often “this looks vaguely similar to one of our epics so let’s start using it and demand 24/7 support” where do people get this idea? AFAICT it's made up.

spaqin 4mo ago

Mostly because CS career advice was always "have some personal projects to show off". Either fully single-person, or be a contributor. And over time, it has soaked some of the corporate, CV-driven development culture as well.

Aurornis 4mo ago

> Call me old but there was a time when “open source project” meant “I had a problem, this is my solution, if someone has the same problem then you are free to use my solution”. These days is more: - building personal brand - showcasing your skills - trying to outsmart somebody else, often because they didn’t merge your pr - sometimes just having fun Linux, MySQL, PostgreSQL, Apache, Python, most web browsers, and large swaths of server code used across the internet have been "open source projects" for years that were more than people sharing their solution as-is. Useful projects have always developed communities. Some people do try to make open source projects for exposure or resume content, but that's usually orthogonal to the projects that get enough traction to have to worry about maintainers disappearing. I think you're mixing two different concepts up

bruce511 4mo ago

You're not wrong, but the License used is critical here. If the code is indeed Open Source, with an OSS license, then you can use it as-is, or just learn from it and write-your-own. You might even fold it as-is into your app. Keep the code, but remove the dependence. Free Software on the other hand is a different animal. The GPL et al is viral. Doing any of the above with GPL software has consequences. Even learning and rewriting is risky- the rewrite better be more than just variable name changes. If you're old school, and you want to share on a "do what you like, I'm not turning this into my day job" basis, where you want folk to actually benefit, yhen I recommend an OSS license over a Free license. On the other hand if your target audience are other Free developers, then a Free license makes complete sense. And if you plan to commercialize your project down the road an aggressive Free license (like say AGPL) is a good choice. Ultimately your choice of license should match your goals.

jraph 4mo ago
Free software licenses and open source licenses are almost the same set, and the difference between the two is not copyleft: the GPL is OSI-approved. The difference is in the spirit, focus, philosophy: free software is concerned about user rights. And if you care about user rights, use a copyleft license to prevent someone from building a proprietary derivative, even if you are not turning it into your day job. Especially if you are not turning it into your day job, a copyfree license is more likely to atract corporate.
- bruce511 4mo ago
  Exactly. If you care about "who" uses the code then Free software certainly helps to limit that. If all you want is to offer "here's some code, knock yourself out" then a license like MIT and BSD is generally more useful to more people.
wging 4mo ago
Many OSS licenses are also free software licenses, even if they are not viral and don't impose severe restrictions on the licensee in the way the GPL does. The MIT license, for example. "Free software" and "GPL" are not synonymous, even GNU doesn't say so. See https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#SoftwareLicenses https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#SoftwareLicen...

xtracto 4mo ago

You forgot the Open Core trap: Company wants to get customers so it lures them into an almost-useful "open source" application that happens to be unisable when wanting to do anything serious.

whateverboat 4mo ago

So what you are saying is that it has now become a professional industry rather than hobby stuff?

lofaszvanitt 4mo ago

This is how programmers use to force to work for companies if they want to earn a living. Time to fight back.