IMO, 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?
Author here. tldraw is not an open source project. It used to be but we switched to a commercial license for our v2 in 2023. The old v1 is still available under MIT; and I try to put as much as we can under MIT license where it makes sense, but the core needs to be licensed in a way that allows us to sell it. We've always been majority source available and still accept community contributions, even though the default is to close external PRs. I care about OSS. I wish the economics of it made sense for us.
> 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?
Dude, you just blew my mind. Your code is under a commercial license?
I'm not sure you realize this, but that nullifies your blog post's purpose of existence.
Why would any reader care about your AI contribution policies if your code isn't even open source?
Be honest with me: would you contribute PRs to Microsoft Office or Adobe Photoshop? No, none of us would do that, because if we buy licenses to those products we are paying customers of proprietary software. It's not our job to fix bugs and add features for Microsoft or Adobe, we paid them to do that for us so that we can focus on our products’ business value, and in turn they keep the code proprietary for themselves.
To put it as bluntly as possible, you're a freeloader. You not only accept contributions, but you keep them as proprietary code, you micromanage contributors, and you stoop even lower by writing a blog post complaining about the quality of those contributions.
I feel bad for your customers that are making PRs to your codebase. Here they are doing free work for your business and they don't even get to keep community ownership of that code. Hell, at least when I contribute to VSCode, we get to fork the hell out of that codebase as it's MIT licensed. You just keep it!!
> I care about OSS.
Doubt! Your actions don't show it! Words are meaningless in comparison.
My advice to you, if you really want it? Cut the bullshit, don't even make the source available. Be honest about what you are: a commercial proprietary software company.
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.
I dunno, I added a major feature to a project I had never interacted with before because I needed the functionality at work. I even used AI to help me (and spent a lot of time cleaning it up, as I didn't want to submit something shameful, but I needed the AI to implement a particular section that was on the edge of my understanding).
The code got accepted and is now released.
I imagine if the project maintainers were curmudgeons like OP, the rest of the community would never benefit from the work I did, and I'd have to keep it as an internal fork.
Am I really that exceptional, where these contributors can count on 1 hand the number of times people like me contributed something useful? I guess it probably depends on the project.
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?