Open source renaissance

James Ross explains how LLM slop is causing projects to close their doors to outside contributors and migrate from GitHub to other code forges in Open Source as We Know It Is Dead. There are some really good points in that article, but I am optimistic that the current low point is the prelude to an open source renaissance. History Let’s have a look at how version control and forges have evolved in the last few decades to get an idea of how they might change in the future. 1982: RCS Local versioning. That is, there’s no easy way to contribute commits to a copy of a repository. Version tracking is per file, not for the entire project. Rudimentary, complex branching. 1990: CVS Client-server model, allowing people with write access to collaborate from their copy of the repository. Project-level versioning, tracking changes to multiple files in a single commit. Easier branching. 1999: SourceForge Started with CVS support, and added Subversion, Bazaar, Git and Mercurial later. “Major…