A new model for open source: closed to pull requests, open to remix
ghuntley
13 points
11 comments
October 14, 2026
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Discussion Highlights (7 comments)
jauntywundrkind
I'm carrying so many patches these days. I need a term for it. This feels like an ok go at it, a remix. Mentioned this just the other day, the want for a term for this: > mercy it's not even a fork. we don't even have a word for this! i'm juggling a bunch of patches atop opencode. sort of a fork. a running fork? https://bsky.app/profile/jauntywunderkind.bsky.social/post/3...
beatboxchad
Afaik LLM-generated code cannot be copyrighted in the USA, and therefore cannot be licensed. It's automatically public domain. This makes it incompatible with most OSS licenses. Several of my personal favorite projects have already prohibited LLM-generated code. That doesn't mean the frequency and quality of contributions won't still increase. I use my LLM harness for all kinds of grunt work that would have sucked up hours. Git surgery, code exploration, PM. But we don't need a whole new paradigm for a brave new world. I've heard that'd boil the sky and poison the water anyway. Too expensive.
outlore
Hasn’t this always been the case with forks?
EarlKing
Sounds like the OpenBSD model to me. Actually, if I'm honest, that's really just the Freeware model of Andrew Fluegelman. You get the program, the source code, the right to make modifications and release them, just don't expect upstream to incorporate them. (If confused, go look up PC-TALK.)
deepsquirrelnet
> All right, I'm going to open up a history lesson because it's been a couple of generations of software engineers since this essay > It created really weird social-structure expectations: that someone who releases code has an obligation to maintain it and get paid nothing for the work. Fundamentally, yeah that is why it took off. Big tech doesn't sell software anymore, they made it a commodity through open source. Now they sell cloud services or consulting, or ads or your data. Just read what Eric Raymond said about it: https://www.oreilly.com/openbook/opensources/book/raymond2.h... > It seemed clear to us in retrospect that the term "free software" had done our movement tremendous damage over the years. Part of this stemmed from the well-known "free-speech/free-beer" ambiguity. Most of it came from something worse--the strong association of the term "free software" with hostility to intellectual property rights, communism, and other ideas hardly likely to endear themselves to an MIS manager. The intention was to find a business model and market it. That's why they distinguished themselves from FOSS in the first place. It's what you see big tech doing today (that's the business model). The outcomes being observed and complained about are literally just the expected outcomes of making software a commodity, which is that businesses need to make money and they don't do it by selling software.
kvemkon
> A new model for open source: closed to pull requests That's how SQLite operates since decades. And it might be good for them. It is specific project with billions of running instances (handling long-term preserved and modified data contrary to curl), but it doesn't apply generally. Allowed pull requests is not equal to obligation to review them and to accept. Some disclaimer about how much time one has for this work is very useful for a potential contributor to know in advance what one can expect.
soundworlds
It's how I currently do Open Source. I like to think of it as a strong form of indirect collaboration - https://johnoestmannmusic.com/indirect-collaboration/