According to the official Discord, “ACX has made the decision to close Booklore and step away.” Some contributors are working together on an unnamed replacement project.
For those not in the loop, Booklore was an app for selfhosting book libraries. It had a nice UI. It was able to store metadata separately from the download files, so you could have an organized library without duplication. In recent weeks, there have been conflicts about AI code, licensing, and general Discord nastiness.
RIP
Edit: The discord, website and github are all gone.
Congrats guys! We did it!
We took a project that someone made for free, shared it to the internet for others to enjoy, worked on in his spare time, and killed it because of his choice in tools. Sure he was probably overwhelmed with issues counting up and demands from his users on his project that he made for free, but he should have developed his application in the way we demanded. It’s truly for the greater good that we have one less free open source project out there, and one less developer working on his passion project.
Seriously. I loathe AI’s encroachment into everything. Copilot and OpenAI are being absolute assholes. However, the people who scream against it on message boards and and tell fellow engineers that they’re evil for using it are honestly approaching about the same level of annoyance to me. Should AI be everywhere? Absolutely not. Does it have actual uses? Absolutely it does. Is AI killing software engineering? Debatable. What isn’t debatable is that us, people, killed this project. We can debate about the ethics of AI for ages. That’s not the point of this comment though.
Right now, an open source project has closed, and some guy who made this for free and shared it with us will probably never develop in the open source community again, AI or not. Open source should mean that anyone can write anything for fun or seriously, and we all have the choice to use it or not. It doesn’t matter if it’s silly or useful or nonsense or horrible, open source means open. Instead we shut down/closed out someone who was contributing. How they were contributing is irrelevant, what is relevant is that they probably never will again. Open means open, open to anyone and everyone. We should all feel ashamed that an open source project was shuttered because of how our community acted.
So, completely uneducated about the real issues that led to this, you decided this was a good opportunity for your pro AI soap box.
Yeah, there’s definitely a reason we can’t have reasonable coverslip conversations around AI.
Kind of skipped over my entire thesis there didn’t you? And my other comments addressing those.
As far as I followed this whole ordeal, his use of ai was maybe 20% of what went wrong with this project. Open contempt for FOSS principles and his contributors, a unilateral (and probably illegal) change in license, Discord censorship, API gatekeeping and disingenuous monetization, along with a general dishonest communicationwere probably more of a nail in this coffin then the use of ai code assistance
Wasn’t the vim maintainer similar dismissive of the community for like a decade before neovim forked and rewrite the entire plugin layer and async layer?
Even with problems things could have improved.
I’m unaware of these, but I’ll take you at your word. I still say even if the guy is an asshole, we still lost someone who was contributing. If he is picking up his toys and going home, we still lost a developer. I wasn’t there for those issues so I don’t know how they were handled.
I’ll compare it to Lemmy. Lemmy devs are (sorry guys) I’ll say… Disagreeable. They are headstrong and definitely have their own opinions which I have different opinions are about. I don’t think we would be friends. However, look at what they built, and the communities we’ve built thanks to their work. They started all of this, and now we have mbin and piefed and others thanks to what they started, even if don’t like how they handle things. We should always remember that the people contribute, and that’s more than the vast majority of us.
(Not directed only at you commenter, but everyone else reading this to share my point of view)
You may need to go catch up on this. The “dev” in this case caused more issues than they solved.
One can’t be missed if one didn’t contribute to anything in the first place.
Who are we missing, Claude?
It seems to me that having an asshole that contributes is a shitty situation, but each to their own.
(hehe poo joke but the point stands)
I use tt-rss. Tho I’ve never interacted with the dev personally, from what I can tell, he is kind of a hard headed, asshole. Still a great piece of software tho. Him being an alleged asshole doesn’t deter me.
It would if he was dumping huge portions of AI generated code into it the repository faster than people could reasonably review it.
Thanks for joining in!
Seriously, enough was going on with the project that the AI was just the final nail (or the deepest nail) in the coffin. What’s important is that we denounce AI where we see it, as this (and not “usage”) is the only non-violent way we have to try and lead a change in how AI is developed and deployed in the first place. The problem is not simply “someone can use AI in their spare time”, it’s what even has to happen as a prerequisite for that to even be a thing in the first place (code theft, mass license violation, environmental destruction, RAM shortages, erosion of civil and digital rights, exemptions for big corpo, you name it).
Open Source means the source is open, not that you can do whatever ass-unethical thing you want. That weird impression of the world is something that techbros, cryptobros and liberals are trying to push. Don’t be fooled. We defended ourselves, and we managed a tie.
There are other problems like reimplemented features after dismissing the PR, threatening to change the licence without contribution approval, and not being able to disassociate criticism of the platform as criticism of him.
The Reddit post about it a few days ago goes into it a lot more.
See my other comment in this thread, sorry it’s a lot and I’m on my phone
I don’t blame the greater community for this one. Booklore was well-received. I have nothing but good wishes for all those involved. Much of the fighting about code quality and AI was among actual contributors.
I share some of your same views. It would be good if devs using AI would state that on their github or codeberg, etc. However, the immediate, kneejerk, backlash probably snuffs that disclosure. Just look ar the reactions to AI here at Lemmy Selfhosted. AI is a tool. As much as I chafe against regulation, it’s a tool that needs some heavy governmental regulation imho, but a tool nonetheless. It’s not going away. I’d say there will come a day when we use AI without even knowing it. It will be seamless.
Unfortunately, right now we are stuck in the novelty phase of AI rice cookers and pretty pictures. I think with some regulation, and more fine tuning, it could become a great dev assistant, and has some very real world use cases. I can understand why people don’t want a 100% AI coded piece of software where the dev really has no idea what they are doing as far as security. I don’t either. That’s an obvious. You’ve got to understand and be able to interpret
andunderstandthe results of an AI query. However, if the dev is competent and uses AI as an assistant, I don’t see the conundrum.I also think there are young devs who are excited about contributing to opensource and the selfhosting community. They have the fire, just not the experience. Experience is something you don’t have until after you need it.
I agree with your take, and I think it’s why there can’t be a rational discussion about AI on the internet, because AI is a very nuanced topic and the internet does not comprehend the concept of nuance.
Like all hype technology, both polar opposite sides will probably be wrong. The best and worst case outcomes are only 2 of an infinite number of outcomes in between. We will probably end up with some form of AI that sits comfortably in the middle.
Thinking that way, for engineers, I think refusing to use it will only limit you. It’s akin to refusing to use an IDE, or css. It may not feel like that, but to companies you might as well say you only code on punchcards. I can personally attest that searching for senior engineering roles last yeardid not ask if I used AI. they asked how much AI I used, and I was required to use it during the interviews. This is not one company. Every company interviewed with. It’s here to stay. Refusing to use it comes off as stubbornness to hiring managers, not some grand fight.
You’re exactly right.
I started my career writing assembly code, by hand, for money; I did not throw my toys out of the cot when that ceased to be a particularly useful skill. I spent a great deal of my career rawdogging malloc(), but then managed runtimes came along… And I also didn’t quit because I didn’t like having training wheels forced on me. Because I understood that writing code was never my job, solving problems was and code was just one of the tools at my disposal to do so.
AI is another tool. It’s fantastically useful in the right pair of hands. Any developer who refuses to use it is simply going to be left behind - and that’s ok, because those people are not software engineers, they’re coders with a hobby - and I’d never expect to tell someone how to enjoy their hobby. But nobody should expect to be paid for it.
I dunno, if we were pushed off machine code onto non-deterministic compilers that ran on a machine thousands of miles away with no way to know when it was changed i think we’d have balked at that too, even if compilers themselves are entirely positive.
I’ve not heard of Booklore or the critiques against it until seeing this post, but I don’t think this take is correct, in parts. And I think much of the confusion has to do with what “open source” means to you, versus that term as a formal definition (ie FOSS), versus the culture that surrounds it. In so many ways, it mirrors the term “free speech” and Popehat (Ken White) has written about how to faithfully separate the different meanings of that term.
Mirroring the same terms from that post, and in the identical spirit of pedantry in the pursuit of tractable discussion, I posit that there are 1) open source rights, 2) open source values, and 3) community decency. The first concerns those legal rights conferred from an open-source (eg ACSL) or Free And Open Source (FOSS, eg MIT or GPL) license. The details of the license and the conferred rights are the proper domain of lawyers, but the choice of which license to release with is the province of contributing developers.
The second concerns “norms” that projects adhere to, such as not contributing non-owned code (eg written on employer time and without authorization to release) or when projects self-organize a process for making community-driven changes but with a supervising BDFL (eg Python and its PEPs). These are not easy or practical to enforce, but represent a good-faith action that keeps the community or project together. These are almost always a balancing-act of competing interests, but in practice work – until they don’t.
Finally, the third is about how the user-base and contributor-base respect (or not) the project and its contributors. Should contributors be considered the end-all-be-all arbiters for the direction of the project? How much weight should a developer code-of-conduct carry? Can one developer be jettisoned to keep nine other developers onboard? This is more about social interactions than about software (ie “political”) but it cannot be fully divorced from any software made by humans. So long as humans are writing software, there will always be questions about how it is done.
So laying that foundation, I address your points.
This definition of open-source is mixing up open-source rights (“we al have the choice to use it or not” and “anyone can write anything”) with open-source values (“for fun or seriously” and “doesn’t matter if it’s silly or useful”). The statement of “open source means open” does not actually convey anything. The final sentence is an argument in the name of community decency.
To be abundantly clear, I agree that harassing someone to the point that they get up and quit, that’s a bad thing. People should not do that. But a candid discussion recognizes that there has been zero impact to open source rights, since the very possibility that “Some contributors are working together on an unnamed replacement project” means that the project can be restarted. More clearly, open-source rights confer an irrevocable license. Even if the original author exits via stage-left, any one of us can pick up the mic and carry on. That is an open-source right, and also an open-source value: people can fork whenever they want.
This is in the realm of community decency because other people would disagree. Plagiarism would be something that violates both the values/norms of open-source and also community decency. AI/LLMs can and do plagiarize. LLMs also produce slop (ie nonfunctioning code), and that’s also verbotten in most projects by norm (PRs would be rejected) or by community decency (PRs would be laughed out).
I would draw the focus much more narrowly: “We should all feel ashamed
that an open source project was shutteredbecause of how our community acted”. Open-source rights and open-source values will persevere beyond us all, but how a community in the here-and-now governs itself is of immediate concern. There are hard questions, just like all community decency questions, but apart from Booklore happening to be open-source, this is not specific at all to FOSS projects.To that end, I close with the following: build the communities you want to see. No amount of people-pleasing will unify all, so do what you can to bring together a coalition of like-minded people. Find allies that will bat for you, and that you would bat for. Reject those who will not extend to you the same courtesy. Software devs find for themselves new communities all the time through that wonderful Internet thing, but they are not without agency to change the course of history, simply by carefully choosing whom they will invest in a community with. Never apologize for having high standards. Go forth and find your place in this world.
I’m on my phone now so I can’t respond to everything. I wanted to say I do disagree, but I appreciate you taking the time to write it out and I understand your point of view.
While I understand the underlying guidelines we try to uphold, I don’t think they can be force applied to everyone who contributes, and it’s not fair to hold people to standards they didn’t personally agree to. If that’s your personal belief, I’m all for it, but this guy might have just decided to make a project without caring about the exact definitions of OSS. that’s a risk we take using OSS code is that the maintainer can change their minds, but we can also take it and do what we please with it.
Anyway, I’d have more but thumbs are stupid. Thank you for your thoughtful reply
This is certainly an opinion, but here is a list of major projects that have a code of conduct: https://opensourceconduct.com/projects . How well those projects enforce their CoCs, idk. But they are applied, otherwise they wouldn’t bother writing out a CoC.
Software development is not the only place which holds people to standards. The realm of criminal and civil law, education, and business all hold people to standards, whether those people like it or not. In fact, it’s hard to think of any realm that allows opt-out for standards, barring the incel-ridden corners of the web.
Starting any project – as in, inviting other people to join in – is distinct from just publishing a public Git repo. I too can just post my random pet projects to Codeberg, but that does not mean I will necessarily accept PRs or bug reports, let alone even responding to those. But to actually announce something, that where the project begins. And to do so recklessly does reflect poorly upon the maintainer.
My understanding is that it wasn’t so much his “choice in tools” it was privacy concerns surrounding that choice.
No, if people use AI for organizing the shopping list they use to buy components for the server my favorite FOSS program that I’ve never contributed to or donated to, then they must be burned in effigy and cursed to the ends of the earth. I’ve never built a thing in my life, but if I did, it certainly wouldn’t be with AI.
You’re welcome.