The harder a piece of code is to parse, the more you will tend to rely on LLM-based analysis and generation to maintain and build from it. Illegibility to humans is vendor lock-in. That's the business model.

The enclosure of the FOSS commons may seem like a programmer-specific problem, but it really affects everyone. Privacy-preserving apps like Signal, for example, serve a purpose precisely because they're open and can be audited. Take away that ability to verify the developer's claims by parsing the code, and all guarantees are lost. The more that AI vendors succeed in locking in the FOSS commons, the less transparency we'll have into what our software actually does.

It is 0% coincidence that these technologies are being pushed by some of the least transparent companies on the planet.

TL;DR the take is argumented and ends with:

So don't get too worked up about an individual using LLMs, that's not what's undermining the very foundations of FOSS. It's a drivel-spewing idiot who's happily planning to sink another 100 billion $ on a probabilistic text generator. We're talking about people using money that could have solved several world-spanning problems - even profitted from doing so! - and still didn't. That's who we're talking about.

Un exemple d'architecture numérique pour le Service Départemental d'Indencie et de Secours (SDIS) (du 57).

Every attempt to score open source is not accurate.

The most consequential mistake is treating the absence of a signal as a low value of that signal.

Missing FUNDING file

Easy to collect doesn't mean something

Stars on Github (ICU only 3.5k, 2.5k), CVE counts (compare the Linux kernel to

One number, many units

npm "download" is mostly a count of CIcache misses. Dependent counts are different between a string-padding helper on npm and a C compression library that is statically linked and distributed as vendor or a git submodule.

Github as the visible universe

Not everything is on GitHub. Contributors (so the bus factor count too)

Project identity is different on different platform

curl has many names across platforms.

Invisible funding

The most common funding arrangement for critical infrastructure is none of those. It’s a maintainer employed by Red Hat, Google, Intel, Canonical, or a hardware vendor, with the project as some or all of their job, and that arrangement leaves no trace in any file a crawler can fetch. The second most common is consulting and support contracts around the project, which is similarly invisible.

and it compounds because the project doesn't look like an npm package. "The quiet system library with one tired maintainer and no dashboard footprint is exactly what we built all of this tooling to find, and it remains the thing the tooling is structurally worst at seeing."

• Your best users are the ones who complain. A user told me at 10pm that my uninstaller just nuked his shell config. My instinct was to get defensive. Instead I traced it — and found it was worse than reported. That one message led to rewriting the entire uninstall logic from scratch. Every angry bug report is a gift.
• Your favorite metric can lie to you. I built a cache that reduced file reads from 2,000 tokens to 13. Great numbers. Then a user told me: "Models waste more tokens working around stale cache than the cache saves." He was right. The fix wasn't removing caching — it was making invalidation smarter. Your dashboard can look great while the experience is terrible.
• Saying no is the hardest part. A new feature would have let me compress all tool output automatically. Massive savings on paper. I designed it, prototyped it, then killed it. Because when compression eats an error message, there's no undo. Protecting quality beats shipping features.
• Community is a relationship, not a channel. When someone reports a bug, my first response matters more than the fix. "Will check" buys time but shows I'm listening. Following up shows respect. Shipping the fix shows they matter. My best testers are people who once filed angry reports.
• Ship the boring stuff first. Nobody cares about your adaptive entropy-based compression algorithm if the installer breaks their dotfiles. Get the fundamentals right — install, uninstall, doctor, setup — before you get clever.
• Focus means killing good ideas. My backlog has 50+ ideas. Each one is good. But spreading across all of them means none become great. Rust helps here — the compiler forces you to finish what you start.

The maintainer retires, so there are many projects going unmaintained without help

Le finance de l'open source est constamment un challenge

C'est excellent que 2000 établissements sanitaires et médico-sociaux essaient de s'émanciper en développant leurs propres outils pour améliorer les services aux adhérents, rendre les offres de marchés plus lisibles et optimiser son organisation interne.

Ok, FreeType renders font on LCD screens 40% faster

The "Open Web" works only because the affordances are here.

As AI allows to easily create and consume content, these affordances for the open web have changed. For those who want to sell ads next to their content or entice people to subscribe, the rise of AI feels like betrayal.

Furthermore, on a technical level serving content to anyone who asks for it on a global scale might be a commodity service now -- and so very inexpensive to do, in some cases -- but it’s not free, and the costs add up at scale.

It's about control. As hyperbole, some what pixel-perfect control over the information is presented, used and its conditions, whereas some open access advocates want all information to be usable for anything without conditions. Both would be bad for the Open Web

Comme acutellement, 35 millions par an, 0, 50 ou 70. Il s'agit ici de gestion financière.

En revanche et ce serait plus intéressant:

1. "One key problem that open source developers have been pointing out for years is public procurement. They often face major problems selling their products to public authorities because their processes are set up for readily available software packages. The paper calls on the EU to better align its procurement rules with open source. The personnel responsible for buying software should also be better educated on how open source software works – with the Commission setting a good example." -> Euractiv negotiates to use OVH btw
2. Another idea is an EU legal form for open source organisations financed through donations. This legal form should be easy, the paper argues, and therefore accessible to developers.

The website we needed

The website we needed

For a software release, it is relevant to include what the software is doing.

I just have no idea what three quarters of these projects actually do. When you announce a new release, please give us (your adoring but slightly confused audience) just a tiny bit of context. What the software does, why the release is cool and what it requires to work.

It claims complying with the GDPR

A free open-source chat platform

Lessons from maintaining an open source tool:

1. Simplicity is a feature
2. Real users reveal problems
3. open source is a marathon

Yet through all these changes, the need for efficient HTML delivery remains constant. That's perhaps the most interesting lesson: fundamental problems persist even as technologies evolve.