alt Hacker NewsIMO, you’re not really an open source project if you’re not accepting contributions with reasonably low friction.
I’ll call this what it is: a commercial product (they have a pricing page) that uses open source as marketing to sell more licenses.
The only PRs they want are ones that offer free professional level labor.
They’re too uncaring about the benefits of an open community to come up with a workflow to adapt to AI.
It honestly gives me a lack of confidence that they can maintain their own code quality standards with their own employees.
Think about it: when/if this company grows to a larger size, if they can’t handle AI slop from contributors how can they handle AI slop from a large employee base?
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tldraw used to be FOSS but they changed the license in 2023. https://tldraw.substack.com/p/license-updates-for-the-tldraw...
BigBlueButton had to fork tldraw because of this. https://docs.bigbluebutton.org/new-features/#we-have-forked-...
I've been writing open source code for 30 years. I can count on 1 hand the number of times a random 3rd party PR contributed value to the project. The main contributions of the community are usually debugging and feedback. While it does happen that a good contribution comes from the community, the main values from opening code are increased user trust and identifying bugs. Almost every single open source project has a small number of devs who write almost all the code. The reasons for this are always about code quality. The idea that "the community" writes any open source projects is just fantasy. So refusing AI slop is just continuing on with these same policies that have worked for decades.