There's technical open source (code licensed under free license), social open source (accepting contributions, working towards the user, maintaining), and stewarded open source ("the product" with the team","url":"https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49368295","role":"pain","weight":1.1742831,"occurredAt":"2026-08-19T23:03:27.000Z","sourceKey":"hackernews","sourceName":"Hacker News","credibility":0.7,"venue":"news","intent":"problem_report","painScore":0.68759257,"sentiment":-0.4814815,"confidence":0.6958333,"matchedPatterns":["terrible","frustrating"],"statement":"- After the infrastructure is broken, we're trying to remove it completely message it'd better to ask if the developers have ideas, plans, or maybe draft implementation on how it could be improved, and if anybody is working on th…","title":null,"body":"I will use the terminology which I invented and use, I don't know more appropriate words.
There's technical open source (code licensed under free license), social open source (accepting contributions, working towards the user, maintaining), and stewarded open source ("the product" with the team, roadmaps, release cycles, but the code is open and free).
Technical vs social: many projects are made to solve the issue of the author, and just published on the internet under a FOSS license for everyone, nothing more. For a random project on the internet, you should not by default assume that the author is willing to fix the issue you report, implement the feature you'd like to have, or merge your contributed code — author may not be interested in solving your issue, they already solved theirs. That's open source which does not have social component.
What you have here is a stewarded open source: a Google project which have a team on a salary. The team has their own plans and goals on their product, and in addition they accept contributions. They might not be interested in them, or even be hostile to external contributions, because some PRs just disrupt their plans, not suitable in their architecture view, or could be seen as a maintenance burden which they didn't ask for. Check CONTRIBUTING.md in the repository: the code contribution is in the bottom of the list, and they have a hour and a half movie on how to contribute!
Since this is a team on a salary, your task is first and foremost to explain the issue you have, and make it clear what is wrong currently, why is it wrong, and how it could be improved. The code contribution should follow only after you've been understood and the issue has been confirmed as an issue. Only then you can make a suggestion PR if you feel so ("I fixed it this way, it works for me, take a look").
Issues with your PR:
- Minor one: used only what-have-been-done technical description instead of just describing the issue in plain words. Not "Reduce iOS pointer latency by dispatching pending input before BeginFrame" and a wall of refactoring later, but "Faster vsync and pointer painting performance", with short technical summary inside of PR message (maybe even video/tests of vsync latency before/after), and all the meat inside the commit message. Keep PR worded in a simple terms.
- Used PR comments as a chat: you wrote like 8 messages one after another in an hour. Give the developers some time to think, to maybe reconsider their decision or vision. The person might just had a bad day and you're just nagging them with questions which require thinking and remembering the code. Wait at least a day, or better a week, before responding to the message with outcome you did not expect.
- After "the infrastructure is broken, we're trying to remove it completely" message it'd better to ask if the developers have ideas, plans, or maybe draft implementation on how it could be improved, and if anybody is working on that already, instead of defending your position when you received decline.
You've got frustrated and disappointed that your PR did not get merged. I understand you and I was in your shoes. However keep in mind what I wrote about stewarded projects and take a closer look where are you contributing at: a project which requires you to sign CLA, which means to give your code authorship to the company. Do you really want to improve the product which is developed for money, without you getting money and giving away code authorship?
Won't write anything in addition, just recommend reading these two articles:
https://sneak.berlin/20250720/the-agpl-is-nonfree/, it's about completely different topic, but read from "Gifts absolutely do not work like that".\nAnd https://dri.es/license-only-versus-stewarded-open-source","offTopic":false},{"id":"3eedfc63-1bee-4c09-89d6-978e414c71b1","excerpt":" — > This article is lame. How about focusing on back-ends that pretend to support self-hosting but make it difficult by perpetuating massive gaps in its documentation (looking at you, Supabase)?
that's one way of enshittifying, but what the article talks about is nonetheless very important.
People rely on ","url":"https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46417458","role":"request","weight":1.080625,"occurredAt":"2025-12-29T04:23:52.000Z","sourceKey":"hackernews","sourceName":"Hacker News","credibility":0.7,"venue":"news","intent":"feature_request","painScore":0.33,"sentiment":0.5,"confidence":0.8125,"matchedPatterns":["free_tier","missing_feature","workaround"],"statement":"So for this reason, eg when people are upset that mattermost limits the messages to 10000, their real quarrel isn't really even with the scorpion, who is known to sting, it is with the lack of there being a social safety net for this…","title":null,"body":"> This article is lame. How about focusing on back-ends that pretend to support self-hosting but make it difficult by perpetuating massive gaps in its documentation (looking at you, Supabase)?
that's one way of enshittifying, but what the article talks about is nonetheless very important.
People rely on projects being open source (or rather: _hosted on github_) as some sort of mark of freedom from shitty features and burdensome monetization.
As the examples illustrate, the pattern of capturing users with a good offering and then subsequently squeezing them for money can very easily be done by open source software with free licenses. The reason for that is that source code being available is not, alone, enough to ensure not getting captured by adversarial interests.
What you ALSO need is people wanting to put in the work to create a parallel fork to continuously keep the enshittification at bay. Someone who rolls a distribution with a massive amount of ever-decaying patches, increasingly large amounts of workarounds, etc. Or, alternatively, a "final release" style fork that enters maintenance mode and only ever backports security vulnerability fixes. Either of those is a huge amount of work and it's not even sure that people will find that fork on their own rather than just assume "things are like that now".
Given that the code's originating corporation can and will eagerly throw whole teams of people at disabling such efforts, the counter-efforts would require the same amount of free labor to be successful - or even larger, given that it's easy to wreck things for the code's originator but it's difficult to fix them for the restoration crew.
This pattern, repeated in many projects over the decades since GPL2 and MIT were produced, displays that merely being free and open source does not create a complete anti enshittification measure for the end user. What is actually necessary is a societal measure, a safety web made up of developers dedicated to conservation of important software, who would be capable of correcting any stupid decisions made by pointy-haired managers. There are some small projects like this (eg Apache, and many more) but they are not all-encompassing and many projects that are important to people are without such a safety net.
So for this reason, eg when people are upset that mattermost limits the messages to 10000, their real quarrel isn't really even with the scorpion, who is known to sting, it is with the lack of there being a social safety net for this particular software. Their efforts would be well spent on rapidly building such a safety network to quickly force the corporation's hand into increasingly more desperate measures, accelerating their endgame and self-induced implosion. Then, after the corpo's greed inevitably makes them eat themselves in full, the software can enter the normal space of FOSS development rather than forever remain this corporate slave-product that is pact-bound to a Delaware LLC by a chain of corporate greed.
Only once any free fork's competition backed by VCs burning their money on a ceremonial heap has been removed can the free version of the software become the central source for all users and therefore become successful, rather than continuously play catch up with a throng of H-2B holders.","offTopic":false},{"id":"541d9c8e-82bd-43af-a929-4af28b46b350","excerpt":" — The only major ideological component of this matter is that both the free software movement and the open source movement are concerned with the rights of end users, not the sustainability of businesses. That's really it. Open source has always been much less focused on ideology and more on practicality; ","url":"https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46297167","role":"request","weight":0.9254583,"occurredAt":"2025-12-17T01:32:40.000Z","sourceKey":"hackernews","sourceName":"Hacker News","credibility":0.7,"venue":"news","intent":"feature_request","painScore":0.33,"sentiment":0.37931034,"confidence":0.6958333,"matchedPatterns":["please_add","workaround"],"statement":"And if the concept of shared source projects is really so enticing, it should be able to gain relevance the same way open source did.","title":null,"body":"The only major ideological component of this matter is that both the free software movement and the open source movement are concerned with the rights of end users, not the sustainability of businesses. That's really it. Open source has always been much less focused on ideology and more on practicality; I reckon that's part of why it is the more prevalent movement in the first place.
But just because it's not about ideological purity, that doesn't mean it can just be a lawless free for all, because it would essentially destroy the utility of open source in the first place. Please read this sentence carefully and understand the implications, it is extremely important: The AGPL is a less permissive license than O'Saasy, yet it is an actual true open source license. This is not because of ideology. This is because open source doesn't practically work without the constraints in the definition.
I already listed some serious practical concerns, along with the problem that it disturbs the balance between contributors that makes open source work on a social level. However, I honestly feel like it's just scratching the surface. If you keep itching at the practical implications, it only gets worse from there.
For example, let's say there are two MIT licensed projects. One of them wants to adopt code from the other. No problem at all: just copy it in and make sure to have the correct copyright notices attached. Done.
Now, let's say you have two projects with the O'Saasy license. Uh oh: this doesn't "just work" anymore, because there are two "original Licensors" and this clause conflicts with itself in the two different invocations.
If you can't even share code between projects with the same damn license, I really feel like your argument for how this still totally counts as open source is just weak as all hell.
Now I get that some people take issue with the fact that there even is a socially-held definition of what "open source" means, but if there wasn't, and it was a total free-for-all, the communal nature of open source simply wouldn't work. And the irony of all of this is that part of the reason why so many SaaS companies want to release their projects as open source is because of how amazing it is for their PR and early adoption. And that has happened because of the careful coordination of the open source definition, to try to gatekeep the movement. Not for ideological reasons, but literally to ensure that the utility of the concept is able to be fully realized.
It isn't a huge deal if shared source, source available, "fair source" or whatever else people want to exist exists. In fact, it's much better if we don't dilute the meaning of open source with stuff that is so practically different anyways. And if the concept of shared source projects is really so enticing, it should be able to gain relevance the same way open source did.
Of course, in reality, if we stop pretending and playing devil's advocates for five whole minutes, we can all admit to ourselves that companies that would use these licenses usually have very good reason to worry about their business model and the odds are very good that the software will either be unavailable or significantly more closed off down the road.
Some will argue that this isn't a rug pull. After all, it's free and you're entitled to nothing. And I do actually agree with that "you're entitled to nothing" part, but the trouble is when you start trying to take the valuable brand of a movement like open source as a marketing tool only to pull the rug later. And yes, it is a rug pull. Whether it's legal or perhaps even fair, it's still a rug pull. Like if I pull a homeless guy off the street and offer him a bed to sleep in and food, then cut it off abruptly 6 months later, most people would definitely see how it is totally reasonable for me to not have to indefinitely bear the burden of trying to support this person. The trouble isn't that they deserve my financial support, it's that I offered it and then simply abruptly cut it off. That's a rug pull. That's what MinIO did: they gave us an option under the same pretenses we've enjoyed software like Linux or PostgreSQL under, then decided to just simply discontinue it. No warning, it was just gone. Either pay for AIstor or your production infrastructure is now running unsupported code that will not be patched. Hope you didn't use it anywhere important. ("If you used it somewhere important, why not pay?" Sure. Now tell that to e.g. non-profits with shoestring budgets that chose open source because they couldn't afford anything else.)
And, I honestly believe that these unfair CLAs that allow this behavior have done immense damage to the "brand" of open source. It isn't just a niche thing: almost every startup does it now. Very few organizations use more reasonable CLAs that answer practical concerns while still ensuring that contributors are not taken advantage of. Even fewer organizations stick to just DCOs that fulfill the minimal legal obligations. Most of them are doing the same thing, for the same reason. And I'm sure that the founders may genuinely believe that they have no intention of hitting the big red button unless they need to, but I think it's fair to say that ignorance is not a good excuse here. We've seen this game play out too many times.
The "open source but not" license is just another extension of this awful practice, and it only serves to muddy the waters. We should celebrate rather than mourn the fact that open source has gatekeepers trying to ensure that the term doesn't wind up fucking meaningless in a pursuit to burn as much VC money as fast as possible so already well-off dudes can get richer. Ideological purity is mostly not of interest to me, other than my belief that open source should be about the rights of users. Other than that, the problems here are purely practical, and the practical problems are quite severe.
So what should SaaS companies do, then?
- If they really want to be truly open source, they should release code under the AGPL. The major cloud providers are immune to even touching AGPL code anyways, but even if they decide to stop pushing dumb FUD, for all it's faults, AGPL would ensure that they can't just run with it; they have to contribute their changes upstream.
- If they actually just like the practical utility offered by developers having source code access, they can release the software not under an open source license. Since the code isn't of use to the open source community, it doesn't matter much if it's a "shared source" license or not; a traditional EULA is just as fine, and doesn't feel like it is masquerading as if it's part of the open source ecosystem.
(Edit: though there are some clever other options, like the time-release licenses that go open source after a period of time. I honestly see far less problem with this sort of license, though to avoid ambiguity it would also be good to explicitly release old code under a pure open source license, just to avoid the question of whether or not the time-release concept would work properly in court. I have seen this done already. This seems like a neat workaround at least.)
- Or just simply don't even release the source. There is plenty of closed source software in the world and I really don't think most open source advocates are even bothered by this.
- If you use a CLA with your "truly" open source project, choose one that has a legally-binding guarantee that the code remains "open". That way, you use a CLA for all of its practical uses while being able to reassure contributors that they're not being manipulated.
(P.S.: I realize that the focus on contributors also is bothersome to some, considering how few external contributors many projects wind up with. However, contributions, IMO, are a major part of what makes open source tick, and the value of contributions is not weighed in the number of lines of code they diff. I really think creating an environment where contributors feel like they've been duped would do serious harm to the open source ecosystem. Or rather, already has.)
This is all very difficult for people to grasp because there are many who simply haven't managed to understand how serious the implications really are, or perhaps they have a vested interest in not seeing it. But I promise you, the "ideological purity" bit here is a red herring. I sincerely do not believe open source would work if there were such vastly different concepts under the same label. From a literal standpoint, it's easy to see "MIT with just one clause added" and not see how that's not "open source", but it's entirely about what the clause practically means that makes it such a huge problem for us.","offTopic":false},{"id":"5fd913fa-8d12-481b-b13b-7c500842d938","excerpt":" — Allow me to auto-translate my comment which initially was a response to "How can an ordinary developer get involved in the open source community, and is it worth it?" article (in Russian), because it describes how these different social expectations arise from the start.
It's very long and poorly st","url":"https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47988108","role":"pain","weight":0.89577776,"occurredAt":"2026-05-02T16:56:32.000Z","sourceKey":"hackernews","sourceName":"Hacker News","credibility":0.7,"venue":"news","intent":"feature_request","painScore":0.5466667,"sentiment":-0.46666667,"confidence":0.57916665,"matchedPatterns":["missing_feature"],"statement":"From my experience, I believe that the lack of mention of this distinction between technical and social open source is the main cause of disagreements, disputes, and, ultimately, burnout due to misaligned social expectations.","title":null,"body":"Allow me to auto-translate my comment which initially was a response to "How can an ordinary developer get involved in the open source community, and is it worth it?" article (in Russian), because it describes how these different social expectations arise from the start.
It's very long and poorly structured, but it's valuable from my standpint. Don't read if you value your time.
---
Your article only covers the most well-known, largest, and established projects that meet both the technical definition of open source (open source code, under a free license) and the social definition (code is publicly available to everyone, free of charge, with both bug fixes and simple bug reports encouraged), and are also economically attractive to businesses (more on that later).\nThere may be a couple of hundred such successful projects. A drop in the ocean of open source.
From my experience, I believe that the lack of mention of this distinction between technical and social open source is the main cause of disagreements, disputes, and, ultimately, burnout due to misaligned social expectations.
---
FFmpeg vs. AWS (spoiler)
https://x.com/FFmpeg/status/2024934828961923514
This can even be seen in your screenshot of AWS vs. FFmpeg in the article: the author of the FFmpeg Twitter account repeatedly believes that corporations owe something since they use open source code, even though the license doesn't obligate them to do so. Moreover, when Google launched its fuzzing program (objectively the most advanced in the industry), which automatically identifies and reports security issues (which is a significant contribution in itself), FFmpeg wanted not just code fixes but also Google to pay them for the maintainers' time!
We came up with LICENSE.md, but we didn't think of SOCIAL.md.
---
In other words, it's a digital version of the tragedy of the commons, in which the cycle repeats itself from project to project:
* Initially, some technical open-source software is created, under a free license, to solve a specific problem, either for oneself or for a limited number of people.
* First, a few users appear, saying it would be nice to have such-and-such a feature—the authors implement it, since it's not that difficult and generally useful.
* Then, as users grow, handling their requests becomes tedious—often, features are offered that the author will never use, or support for a platform requires a significant amount of code that the author isn't interested in, and they can't test the software on.
* The worst thing is when the software becomes popular (especially if it works reliably and is unique in its kind) and some other large project starts using it. Congratulations, your project is now a public good. In a single day, the burden of social responsibility for any bug or security issue falls on the shoulders of the author/maintainer, because it now affects not only the initial limited user base, but potentially millions of users of other software that relies on both your code and you directly.
Until the final stage, you could sit down, think, and determine what exactly you're doing, and take steps to prevent this or that scenario (or, conversely, develop deliberately toward that scenario). But once that happens, it's too late to do anything. You've effectively become a provider of social software, with all its advantages and disadvantages, and it will be very psychologically scary to say "no" to people and somehow get out of this situation in the short term.
FFmpeg, for example, still refuses to recognize itself as social software, despite being used by hundreds of large projects and being the default distribution on desktop Linux systems.
---
How is this expressed? (spoiler)
FFmpeg's stated mission on its website is as follows:
FFmpeg is the leading multimedia framework, capable of decode, encode, transcode, mux, demux, stream, filter, and play pretty much anything humans and machines have created. It supports the most obscure ancient formats to the cutting edge. It doesn't matter if they were designed by some standards committee, the community, or a corporation.
This conflicts with the security needs of a wide range of users: the more multimedia formats supported, the wider the attack vectors available for users of any software that uses ffmpeg: video players, browsers, instant messengers, preview generators, etc. A security flaw in an old codec could lead to browser compromise if a user simply visits a page with a malicious video.
This isn't a hypothetical danger—errors in file format demuxers and multimedia codecs are among the most commonly exploited. Here's a very recent example (Dolby decoder on Android), and here's a more high-profile and complex one (JBIG2 to PDF on iOS/macOS).
It's assumed that programmers in third-party projects using the library have sufficient knowledge to correctly and securely configure the library in their software, as FFmpeg's primary goal is to ensure playback of a wide range of files, not to address the needs of developers who use the library as a dependency or the end users of that third-party software.
According to the ffmpeg Twitter account, its use on AWS isn't a sign of the library's success or quality, something to be proud of, but rather a significant psychological burden for the project, as the company provides neither funding nor human resources. One can only expect even more tickets in the event of problems, and a lack of fixes for bugs, which Amazon fixes only internally, rather than contributing back to the project.
---
If a project doesn't have any obvious distinguishing features that indicate it's not social, it's assumed to be so by default.
If a project is on GitHub, has a readme and an issues section, the average user or programmer will assume the author is writing for people, for society, for everyone around them, interested in developing the project, adding new features (especially those I need), and improving it in every way for the benefit of all users. After all, if that's not the case, why even publish it?
I used to have to explain the problem and the difference to an outraged public, but recently I came across an article by Jeffrey Paul https://sneak.berlin/20250720/the-agpl-is-nonfree/ comparing open-source code to a gift! My explanation boiled down to:
"Don't like the gift, it doesn't suit you? Throw it out and forget it!"
Money.
If you're making something that doesn't feel like a product (for example, a library that solves a specific problem that a non-programmer wouldn't be able to use, or even need), it would be a great success to get anything at all.
Have you ever considered donating (money, improved documentation, or code fixes) to such widely used and significant projects as glibc (a C library), FriBidi (a library for working with right-to-left scripts: Arabic/Hebrew), or libusb (a cross-platform low-level library for working with USB devices)?
Each of these libraries is extremely popular and has a user base of billions of devices. They're usually the ones people think about when something isn't working.
When I read articles like this one (remember the title: "How Can an Ordinary Developer Get Into Open Source and Is It Worth It?" The examples include free products created by corporations, or commercial products initially oriented toward open source, but open source), and I always wonder: what does open source even mean to the author? It seems to me that today it's analogous to an "open source business," with a hierarchy a la the cream of society (whom we'll be writing about, where it's prestigious to contribute your code) and some homeless people with their libraries at the bottom, who aren't even worth touching.
>>(quote from the article) I personally met someone who dragged out a PR for a week because he didn't understand what a CLA was or how to sign it.
Do you understand what a CLA is? Perhaps you should explain it to the reader, otherwise they might not want to contribute to such a project after the explanation? Perhaps the idea of transferring their copyrights to a corporation isn't appealing to them at all? Or maybe there's a code maintenance obligation for X years, and they're not even aware of it?
The presence of a CLA, if it mentions transfer of rights, usually means that for once, it's safe to shift responsibility for solving your problem to the maintainers by creating an issue, rather than digging around in the code. People won't complain, because they're working on the project for money and that's their job!","offTopic":false},{"id":"c197abd2-6d12-4fd5-9974-16747ca8f6c7","excerpt":" — Ladybird is Open Source and doesn't accept outside contributions any more same with sqlite and many other projects. Lots of Google's oss projects also are not very open to contribution.
At this point I find it deeply troubling that it isn't open source. I respect Chris I know folks who have worked w","url":"https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49264321","role":"pain","weight":0.5657143,"occurredAt":"2026-08-11T20:53:22.000Z","sourceKey":"hackernews","sourceName":"Hacker News","credibility":0.7,"venue":"news","intent":"other","painScore":0.2857143,"sentiment":-0.71428573,"confidence":0.44,"matchedPatterns":[],"statement":"Ladybird is Open Source and doesn't accept outside contributions any more same with sqlite and many other projects.","title":null,"body":"Ladybird is Open Source and doesn't accept outside contributions any more same with sqlite and many other projects. Lots of Google's oss projects also are not very open to contribution.
At this point I find it deeply troubling that it isn't open source. I respect Chris I know folks who have worked with him and but at the end of the day I feel too weird about this entire closed source programming language thing.
If we complain to Nvidia about there weird closed source limitations, I think Mojo is just as bad. You don't even know what your compiler might be doing, and if it does something wrong you can't fix it, you now have to file a bug and wait until the gods from above come to your rescue.
I have had similar issues with drivers, I have faced soo many driver bugs in my work and the answer is always write more code that works around it somehow, this warp level is bad, this feature doesn't work with these values, etc. etc. Why can't I fix them, I have often on Linux just pinged the Mesa team about driver bugs with a rough draft of a patch and gotten it fixed, I can even patch and run it myself when I am in a hurry.
I feel like atleast making stuff, source available like Unreal should be the baseline for any "core" software where a bug could possibly be a major blocking issue for a developer. Windows and Mac are very bad with this.
Mac's CoreML has had soo many bugs over the last couple years I have had to email someone I know at the company to get them fixed or try to get into contact with someone.
Intel's drivers have had bugs too but I have had more contacts there which is a wash. AMD well it's AMD...
Either way closed software sucks I don't want to use fully closed stuff unless I don't have a choice people can make what they want of it. I don't really care.
I care much less about just foss.","offTopic":false}],"breakdown":[{"sourceKey":"hackernews","sourceName":"Hacker News","count":5}],"total":5}}