Open source does not imply open community

Open source software has existed long before the invention of the (D)VCS. The author likely hosted a barebones HTML webpage or a txt file describing the project. There definitely was an FTP server somewhere with tarballs. The author may have been reachable by email.

If you were really lucky, there was a mailing list you could sign up for to receive announcements and maybe discuss the software with other interested parties. There might have been an unofficial IRC channel someone created under the name of the software so people could discuss it.

This was and still is open source.

No "community". No politics. No Code of Conduct. No pull requests or issues. No wiki. No core team.

Later, we had sites like Sourceforge. You got your CVS/SVN and mailing lists operated for essentially "free", and it was easier to build in the open.

Then came the DVCS wars which git decidedly won, and the world eventually converged on Github.

"In the late 00's, Github was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move." - Douglas Adams if he were alive today.

Github turned all of open source into an unpaid job for maintainers. You go to work and find newly assigned tickets; have meetings with stakeholders; plan a roadmap; deal with office politics and distractions; hit your deadlines, metrics, and KPIs; come into work one day and learn the requirements have changed again and now you have to start over. Standups. One-on-ones. Agile. Waterfall. But you're getting a paycheck and health insurance, so you just deal with the nonsense.

Then you come home from work and it's time to unwind on something you enjoy. Ding, you've got notifications. Issues are piling up. Pull requests are being flung in your direction completely rearchitecting the software to do things that were never really within scope. Complaints. Demands. There's now a chat group. People with no patience are angry and now you have to babysit them, have your own one-on-ones. There's a "community" now that you're responsible for. You never signed up for this, but this baggage is just the way it is, right? Suddenly open source is a second job. You're burned out. You don't even have control or direction over your own project anymore without your name being dragged through the mud.

Some projects are so huge and complicated that it requires a team to manage them. But this the exception, not the rule.

Free yourself. Go back to the old ways. Especially if you're angry about the influx of new people and AI bots stealing your attention.

Turn off the issues tracker and the pull requests or deploy a bare git server for releasing your code. Find a small group of people you really know and trust and work with them on projects, or do it completely alone.

You don't need to allow strangers to invade your space. You don't need a performative Code of Conduct or an LLM policy. Open source doesn't need to be developed openly for it to be "open source".

Write code. Make things you like. Use any tools you want. Do code drops at 2am on Christmas day. Whatever you do, don't get tricked into running an operation that's half tech incubator and half daycare for people whose parents gave them a keyboard and no social skills.