In recent months, Max Woolf, the founder of the open source AI project, has experienced an "existential crisis" about his work.
He said that his negative resistance to AI was growing stronger, and that the AI industry was progressing at a rapid pace. Max found that he could not keep up with the progress and fell into doubts about open source work. During this period, he suspended the development of his own open source projects on GitHub, including simpleaichat, the Python interface to ChatGPT.
https://github.com/minimaxir/simpleaichat
Simply put, Max was stressed out and needed some time off. Logically speaking, there should be no problems with his code, because the design of the project itself takes into account the situation where he may suspend development.
However, when Max wanted to return to his old business, he received questions on his project's GitHub questioning whether development had been stopped. Although there is no evidence that there is a problem with the code, simpleaichat, which has a project Star count of up to 3k, still received the question "Has this project been abandoned?"
This shocked and angered Max. He believes that this kind of questioning of developers is exerting unnecessary pressure and is disrespectful.
In fact, open source projects have never had a hard and fast rule that "must continue to be developed." Most open source license agreements clearly state that the software is provided "as is" with no commitment to subsequent maintenance. But some community members seem to assume that open source projects have an obligation to update, which troubles Max and other open source developers.
He believes that the biggest advantage of open source is that it can be forked at any time. If a developer thinks a project is "dead", they can copy the code and maintain it themselves. However, some people threaten the original author with "fork", which makes the original author overwhelmed.
The AI industry is advancing rapidly, exacerbating this problem. Affected by the ChatGPT craze, some AI startups operate on a large scale through venture capital, leading to the misunderstanding that open source AI must "rapidly iterate."
Max said that this unreasonable expectation for the "activity" of open source projects has become the main obstacle that prevents him from continuing his open source work. He is considering starting a business to maintain his project full-time, but the future is uncertain.
He believes that questioning whether an open source project is "dead" itself may give developers an incentive to continue working. If the open source community cannot remain friendly, it will only cause more excellent projects to disappear.
Original text: https://minimaxir.com/2023/11/open-source-dead-github/