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Comment by nunez | Hacker News Reader

That would be a huge loss IMO. Anyone being able to contribute to projects is what makes open source so great. If we all put up walls, then you're basically halfway to the bad old days of closed source software reigning supreme.

Then there's the security concerns that this change would introduce. Forking a codebase is easy, but so are supply chain attacks, especially when some projects are being entirely iterated on and maintained by Claude now.

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> Anyone being able to contribute to projects is what makes open source so great. If we all put up walls, then you're basically halfway to the bad old days of closed source software reigning supreme.

Exaggeration. Is SQLite halfway to closed source software? Open-source is about open source. Free software is about freedom to do things with code. None is about taking contributions from everyone.

    > Is SQLite halfway to closed source software?

Is there a reason that you chose SQLite for your counterpoint? My hot take: I would say that SQLite is halfway to closed source software. Why? The unit tests are not open source. You need to pay to see them. As a result, it would be insanely hard to force SQLite in a sustainable, safe manner. Please don't read this opinion as disliking SQLite for their software or commercial strategy. In hindsight, it looks like real genius to resist substantial forks. One of the biggest "fork threats" to SQLite is the advent of LLMs that can (1) convert C code to a different langugage, like Rust, and (2) write unit tests. Still, a unit test suite for a database while likely contain thousands (or millions) of edge case SQL queries. These are still probably impossible to recreate, considering the 25 year history of bug fixing done by the SQLite team.

For every cathedral (like SQLite) there are 100s of bazaars (like Firefox, Chrome, hundreds of core libraries) that depend on external (and especially first-time) contributors to survive (because not everyone is getting paid to sling open-source).

They are open source cathedrals.

If all software could be as good as sqlite, I would not care how they do open source

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