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.
Just to make a point: I could throw out SQLite as a project that bans open contributions and is wildly successful.
Also, as others pointed out, Linux is technically open contribution bazaar style by 2000s standards. But if you look at how to actually get involved, there’s way more friction compared to the average GitHub project.
I actually think GCC falls into the same category. Even though it’s technically open contribution these days, it’s not exactly a free for all where any AI agent can open a GitHub pull request and get it reviewed.
You have to mail patches to a mailing list and follow a bunch of super specific and arcane rules set by the grey beards.
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.
My implied argument is not so much that "because llm was used, then llm must be used."
The original argument proposed by the author is essentially distilled into, "because llm could be used, we must no longer accept public contributions."
Which is, in my opinion, a disproportional and misguided overreaction. The llm was apparently good enough to do the byte for byte replica, so we know that it can be used (within the context of ladybird) in a way that's apparently acceptable to the maintainers.
To attempt to get more precise, argument is that "closing the gates" is moving in the wrong direction against progress, and a signals a potentially net negative impact to the ladybird project.
I don't have a fully formed thesis, it's a lot of vibes. It just feels wrong. I'm willing to acknowledge that, much like the overreaction that I'm calling out, I could be experiencing a similar kind of conservative gut reaction to the changing of the open source community that unsettles me.
Well see how it all shakes out. Right now the topic is so charged and we don't have a good suite of tools and heuristics for the new world, that were bound to see the gamut of reactions.
It's not unreasonable to feel conflicted about this, but at the same time, I wonder if they're starting to burn out on code review.
Obviously, I don't have a crystal ball.