I’m not entirely following you. I generally don’t contribute anymore, but in the past I’ve found a lot of maintainers are not actually looking for collaboration, rather free labor.
I certainly understand things are different nowadays, I’m talking pre-LLM proliferation.
I don’t know if it’s just me, and these days I do understand it given the widespread adoption of LLMs, but I’ve always detested the idea that I need to reach out and have a conversation with the maintainer before opening a PR. Especially (mainly) when the PR is simply addressing an approved GH issue.
I’ve had so many perfectly acceptable PRs rejected over the years simply because they didn’t “fit the vision” of the maintainer, despite being +1’d by many members of the community or even other contributors. I don’t even mean to imply they were rude or anything, just uninterested in actually merging anything where they didn’t architect the changes themselves upfront.
On one hand I get it, you’ve spent so much time building something it’s fair to want to hold on tightly to that level of control, but to me it's just always felt antithetical to the entire idea of open source.
Makes me feel like I’m not contributing to a true open source project, just doing free labor for someone.
I think the attitude frequently adopted by open source maintainers - comparing themselves to Spielberg - has been a major roadblock to anyone looking to contribute to open source projects for years.
100% agree, and so happy to see somebody call this out. If you go on /r/SelfHosted or any other novice oriented forum, you’ll quickly realize that most users are simply “keeping up with the joneses” when it comes to security & redundancy. That itself is fine I guess, but the zero tolerance they have for anything else is just absurd.
Absolutely. Really gross to see. Heavy majority of the complaints boil down to “I can’t blindly trust everything posted here now?” - as if they could before?? So entitled.
Also annoys me that all of the suggestions on how to handle filtering AI demonstrate a clear lack of understanding around how agentic coding works. Like if you can’t be bothered to understand why “ban any project that uses AI” is not possible, the entire subreddit is probably above your pay grade…
If you enjoy the flamewar, check out /r/SelfHosted which has been losing it's mind over the last few months. The heavy heavy majority of that community is somehow incredibly anti AI despite the fact that the previous "spammy" posts (before ai assisted projects) were all "what is wrong with my docker compose file"??
Sure, I bet they didn't outright dismiss them as useless to the entire field though! I'm sure they still understood the value those fancy tools provided to their peers.
I certainly understand things are different nowadays, I’m talking pre-LLM proliferation.