Have AI workflows changed your propensity to publish your projects as OS?

[u/esiy0676]

I am almost positive this will get caught by some AI-driven filter here too, but I would like to ask developers if the "AI bubble-everything" has changed your willingness to open source your own work products going forward?

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EDIT (T+1h) Just to clarify, this is not about whether AI is detrimental to (yours or others') development quality, what the best policy on contributions is or how to enforce it. It's just about the impact of how others use AI on your own approach to publicly sharing own code.

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You know you will be getting your source forked by - i.a. - low quality AI-enabled whizz kids which will "add value" to the product with the latest designs and whatnot, then have your userbase inquire why you are not "catching up" or "collaborating" with the zealous contributors. Receiving barrage of agentic PRs to review. While at that, let's not forget bogus security reports. And to top it off, have Microsoft constantly scan your (presumably GitHub) repo to train more of the ecosystem to enable the same.

OS is not about the thankless job alone anymore, it is becoming a liability to share one's own stuff, not to mention we have reached cast-pearls-before-swine (sorry) scenario where new projects have it hard to distinguish themselves and provide anything valuable back for the original author.

[u/Decent-Decision-9028]

yeah honestly, and much more selective about what I publish. forks are fine; bogus issues, and generated “improvements” aren’t. creating them is cheap, reviewing them isn’t. Maintainers need stricter contribution standards honestly.

[u/CoVegGirl]

For reference, I think LLVM has a really good AI usage policy:

https://llvm.org/docs/AIToolPolicy.html

[u/SilvernClaws]

Not really. I mean, we already had similar problems with people just forking or copying repositories and pretending it's their work, decades before LLMs were a thing.

[u/baddaywithacamera]

I'm not a developer. I am a photographer who has used AI to build a free and open photo blogging application that is also sort of an odd ecosystem for us. I did this because no one else was building what I needed and along came tools to let me do it, and do it well. (I personally use the hell out of the software and it is exceeding my expectations).

Why is it open source? First, because I have used FOSS for decades and feel it is simply the most ethical way to create and share software. I resent being locked into Windows by companies like Adobe. I won't ever lock people in with my own products. Second, the AI training issue. My gut tells me that AI training improperly used the code of others to train on. You can't own stolen property so since the code the AI trained on came from the commons I feel the output has to go back to the commons. That's how I feel, I'm careful not to tell others how they should feel about it.

My project is on github but it is not open to contributions. Not now, not ever. If someone else forks it, cool, but it is copyleft and free and had better stay that way because I'm sick of people gouging my tribe for money. As long as they keep what they fork copy left then that is how FOSS is supposed to work and good luck to them.

Waiting for the downvoting to start since I mentioned AI...

[u/donk8r]

Went the other way for me. The best bug report we've ever had came from a stranger who pointed an agent at our repo, reproduced two real bugs in our graph layer, and filed both properly. Nobody was ever going to find those by reading the source by hand.

The same cheapness that floods you with generated PRs also put real adversarial testing in reach of people who'd never have cloned the thing.

[u/Sea_Concentrate3951]

i am more cautious about immediately open sourcing core components and i delay public release. do you plan to change your licensing or release timing because of AI-driven misuse?

[u/LightAirMod]

Well as a not-so-skilled coder I can say AI greatly improved my propensity to publish my project, in the sense it allowed me to actually publish something working on github, instead of the jumbled spaghetti code I could write myself. Making it open source was my initial intention, I just couldn't give it the level of quality an actual publication required.

This is to say, I understand and even agree on some of the points you are making, but open source was always meant to be shared, the fact that this sharing is now "automated" by AI doesn't change this.

I can also add AI brought down many barriers and has the potential to greatly extend participation to open source projects. For sure, low quality contribution is a possible issue, but for example in my project allowing basically whoever to take part inventing new modules for the same platform is a big win.

[u/ToddHebebrand]

I'm new to publishing open source, but my experience hasn't been what you describe.

I don't think AI suddenly makes it trivial for someone with no idea what they're doing to meaningfully contribute to a project. Maybe it creates more work if you want to keep up with the community, simply because people can code faster. But they're also contributing more, so there's an upside there. And AI can help review that work and bounce it back when needed just as quickly.

And if part of the philosophy of open source is that ideas and code are open, then I don't think it bothers me that AI is scanning it. I've benefited from AI having learned from open source code. I'm comfortable giving back to that ecosystem.