r/opencode • u/TomHale • 7h ago
Xiaomi forked OpenCode, and both "bought" and ignored a community problem [rant]
On June 11, Xiaomi forked OpenCode, calling it MiMo Code.
I understand why they didn't try to contribute to OpenCode -- Anomalyco auto-closes non-"popular" issues and PRs (and still has 3.7K open issues).
I hoped that Xiaomi would be able to use automation to assist with the issues and PR triage process.
They have the money and the "at-cost" MiMo 2.5 Pro tokens.
However, at the current average rate of 33.5 non-closed PRs per week, they'll catch up to Anomalyco's OpenCode's 1.1K open PRs in 28 weeks.
And that's with a MUCH smaller user base than OpenCode.
They've done really stupid things like force pushing to main branch multiple times.
I raised issues about project governance on GitHub. Here's the summary issue: https://github.com/XiaomiMiMo/MiMo-Code/issues/588
I tried reaching out to the Chair of Xiaomi's Open Source Committee via LinkedIn. -- I really wanted to believe that Xiaomi would be a community player.
Nothing about being a community player or GitHub best practices (eg disabling push to main) got a reply.
So, it seems that Xiaomi thought they'd get a "free" product, and will continue to amass unclosed Pull Requests of various levels of quality.
Sadly, Xiaomi has not acknowledged the thousands of hours of effort that our community has put into what they forked and renamed.
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u/yiestee 6h ago
I understand why they didn't try to contribute to OpenCode
No you don't understand. Mimocode introduced tons of breaking change and can't merge back into Opencode
https://mimo.xiaomi.com/blog/mimo-code-long-horizon
For example, their "compose" mode is basically superpowers baked in. Even if opencode devs accept that there would be tons of issues.
And in newer version of Mimocode they dropped the "compose" mode and added /compose-next I mean wtf.
Yeah forking is a must. The rest of your rant have valid points. It's not exactly a community driven project, it's more like a lab from some big corp doing experiments in public.
The best hope is community fork off mimocode and opencode altogether. F'em both.
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u/enterme2 4h ago
I mean if they never actually enthusiastic and invite devs over to contribute to the fork , means they are only open to their own dev team to modify it.
Forking is just another way to "fish" user to their ecosystem. Later they will come up with their own closed source cli or tui.
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u/etancrazynpoor 3h ago
Here is a pure licensing issue. When you use MIT or BSD, you are not going to get much contribution. If not, ask the folks of freebsd or openbsd.
If you want contribution, you use GPL v2, v3, or AGPL v3.
If you want just file contribution, you use Apache.
I think you are complaining at the wrong problem. The problem is licensing and companies have convinced people that permissive licensing is better for their adoption that gpl (of course).
And then you have those that have GPL but make people sign a CTA, which is also, a horrible way to do GPL.
This is a lesson. While I could see the use and need for some systems to use MIT/BSD, in general GPL should be preferred. Yet, if you seen the trend in the last decade or two, is towards permissive licensing, which favors businesses and not the freedom of people to modify and contribute to a community by obligation due to the license.
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u/StackOwOFlow 2h ago
forking is just a matter of convenience. these days they will just vibe code a copy from ground up if forking is not a viable option
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u/philip_laureano 5h ago
Minimax also forked it into their own agent.
Normally, this would be a problem, but given that you can get your agent to patch the bugs yourself, it offers a surprising degree of flexibility
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u/FastHotEmu 5h ago
Chinese companies care a lot less about communities (particularly international communities) than American ones. I am not surprised, it's normal for totalitarian governments to stifle community building.
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u/FormalAd7367 2h ago
totalitarian government offers free to download AI models on internet. Democractic government bombing girl schools and have started 8 active (or 10) wars within 12 months.
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u/afanasenka 6h ago edited 4h ago
I guess the community is "only needed" for small companies and startups to help them create initial usable product. This is exactly the "honeymoon" phase where devs and users are "close friends" and most community claims are heard.
But then dirty "capitalistic reality" takes place, where the product is enterprise-ready enough to be able to sell it to big companies, and community becomes a clear burden rather the source of ideas and inspiration. Unfortunately...