Mihály Tóth

Open source isn't dying because of AI. It's dying because we all fucking suck. Users. Maintainers. The whole ecosystem. All of us. We fucking suck as users. We use OSS to do our jobs. To build products. To make money. Our employers depend on it. Our startups run on it. But the second a maintainer mentions compensation? We lose our fucking minds. "It should be free." "That's not the open source way." Meanwhile we're extracting value from someone's unpaid labor every single day. We file issues like we paid for a support contract. We demand timelines. We get snippy when our bug isn't the priority. We're not customers. We're guests. Start acting like it. We fucking suck as maintainers. We wanted the GitHub stars. The conference talks. The Twitter followers. We wanted to be the person who "owns" that thing everyone depends on. But now people actually depend on it and we're annoyed. "Talk is cheap, show me the code." So someone does. They spend hours on a PR. We ignore it for months. Close it with no explanation. Or we screenshot their issue and mock them publicly for not reading our minds about what we actually wanted. We invited contributions then punished people for contributing. We don't want to maintain projects. We want to be admired for maintaining them. Not the same thing. We suck at this together. Both sides want the benefits without the responsibilities. As users we want free, maintained, high quality software but won't contribute a damn thing. Not money. Not code. Not even basic respect. As maintainers we want the status of running critical infrastructure but won't communicate, won't collaborate, won't treat people like humans. We all know this shit doesn't work. And yet here we are. Okay Josh, what do you suggest then? If we use OSS and profit from it, we contribute something. Anything. Money, docs, triage, kindness. We stop expecting infinite free labor. If we maintain OSS and we're burnt out, we say so. Archive it. Hand it off. Ghosting is worse than walking away. And if we can't treat each other with basic respect? We don't get to participate. Full stop. Open source runs on people. On us. None of us owe each other a god damn thing. But we could choose to stop being assholes and do better anyway.