alt Hacker NewsI am old enough to remember what happened to GCC. It was also developed by a closed group of maintainers, because "it couldn't work" as a bazaar-style development. Then EGCS fork happened and became more successful.
I think closing contributions (due) to AI will be looked at in a similar way. Forks open to AI will appear, and take over. And people will return to the open model. I think it needs more proliferation of AI coding and reviewing tools, so that AI contributions can be automatically independently reviewed for quality.
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Yes of course it will.
Just two months ago ladybird announced that they were leveraging llms to do the rewrite that had been languishing for a year.
Now, "it breaks the social contract." Alright buddy.
This is part of the insane overreaction rippling through various communities.
The folks who figure out how to do it successfully will succeed. Groups that recede into what they know will either be slow to adapt or end up forming modern old order Mennonite groups.
Which, it's fine no judgement. But those groups don't represent technical / human progress. They represent recalcitrance in the face of a changing culture/world/society.
You're extrapolating from an exception.
EGCS was created because Cygnus, a company whose business was based on GCC, wasn't getting their patches to GCC, maintained by non-company FSF.
Cygnus outcompeted FSF by so much that FSF folded and made EGCS maintainers new maintainers of GCC.
I just don't see average open source project being forked and improved by so much that it eliminates the original.
This requires 3 rare things to happen:
- the project is important enough
- the project is half-dead
- someone is willing to out-compete the original project
That won't happen to e.g. Laydbird. Yes, it's important but it's making rapid progress and they also use ai, so you can't outcompete them just using ai. It's a full-time project for at least one person (Andreas Kling) so unless you manage to find a band of great, unemployed programmers I don't see how you would compete.