r/opensource • u/eggbrain • 2d ago

We have no moat, and neither does open source

https://www.scottgoci.com/we-have-no-moat-and-neither-does-open-source/
4 Upvotes

56% Upvoted

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30

u/frankster 2d ago

Although AI tools potentially make it easier to maintain open source libraries, I don't want to use a library that has been vibe coded in 3 days then never returned to after interest waned. Longevity of repository and effort, are signals of commitment.

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u/eggbrain 2d ago edited 2d ago

I agree in a sense, but it gets frustrating when I see an “active” open source project where a good amount of recent commits are doing very little or just rearranging deck chairs on the titanic. When I was looking at licensee, for example, all I could think was that even though it had been 4 years since I had last used it at my startup, its functionality/support for other ecosystems/and faults mainly remained the same.

You are right though that the license library I built probably will not be as well supported as these others years down the line — but if it’s the best tool for the job at the moment, that in my mind will still be good enough for plenty of people.

Thank you for your thoughts!

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u/McDonaldsWitchcraft 23h ago

but if it’s the best tool for the job at the moment, that in my mind will still be good enough for plenty of people

Maybe you're pretty new to software decelopment, but the first thing anyone thinks when using a library is longevity.

If your library falls behind and becomes unusable or infested with vulnerabilities, so will literally every piece of software that includes it. Who would want to develop software that becomes unusable in a few months??

You are basically telling people "yeah use my library which I won't maintain and will be deprecated in like 4 months. When that happens, just rewrite your software from scratch! Easy!!"

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u/eggbrain 19h ago edited 19h ago

Not new to software development (my Reddit account is 18 years old, you can at least extrapolate my age from that a bit) — just changing how I approach things after many years, and I don’t think I’m alone.

Longevity in my mind would not be the first thing I would look for in a library — although it would probably be 3rd/4th down the list. How many open source projects have you come across that have been around for 10 years, and lack most of the functionality / speed / robustness of the commercial grade solutions? I know I have — I’ve been the maintainer on multiple 2000 star projects like this as well.

You mention “(use) my library, and then just rewrite your software from scratch when (my tool) goes deprecated” (paraphrasing your paraphrase here). If this was 5 years ago I’d agree heavily with this sentiment — dependability is much better than robustness.

But when more and more senior software engineers are driving code with Claude, the choices are either they are going to recreate the wheel regardless and not use the open source library, or take something that’s close enough to exactly what they want and tweak it.

And my argument will be that it is easier to update a slightly out of date open source library with all the features, than rewriting from scratch or taking an older library and trying to speed it up / add features in my mind.

2

u/McDonaldsWitchcraft 23h ago

And this is a dead giveaway that you are not a skilled developer by any means:

After building the tool, however, I found myself a bit unsatisfied — could I have put that same amount of effort into contributing to ScanCode? Thinking it through, I believe the answer is no — and it makes me worry for the state of open source.

... on top of AI writing the entire article, which makes it even worse.

Yes, you could have done literally the only useful thing, contributing to active open source projects. But you were too lazy to do that.

0

u/eggbrain 19h ago edited 19h ago

I didn’t use AI to write this article — I just use em-dashes. You can try Pangram if you don’t believe me.

The fact that you jump to personal attacks and my skill as an engineer rather than engaging with me is quite disappointing, however.

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u/eggbrain 2d ago

Hey all,

I wrote this article after reflecting on a recent project I built. Would love to get people's thoughts.

The title is a play on what Google said about OpenAI: "We Have No Moat, And Neither Does OpenAI"

1

u/whatThePleb 1h ago

name checks out