What is a king to a God?
I’ve been a pretty big open source enthusiast for well over half a decade now, and written dozens of libraries and tools in that time that I happily shared with the world, thinking that maybe someone would find those things useful, and indeed many people did.
However it’s come to a point now with more and more open source projects closing down due to an influx of AI spam PR’s or because thanks to AI nobody even visits the project pages anymore or contributes back at all. It’s all extremes now, bad extremes.
That sucks, but that isn’t even what bothers me the most. Now that I do the vast majority of my software creation with AI - I’m expected to, after all at my day job I create AI tooling, and it does definitely 1.5x my abilities - the artisinal craft of software just for the sake of it no longer feels appealing to me.
Coupled with knowing that AI bots scrape all my creations and profit off of them with no credit or care for the licenses that my software uses also leaves a sour taste in my mouth. I applaud those who keep on keeping on, but I’m losing the spark, the wonder, when it comes to open source software.
I soft-launched invobi.com a month ago or so, and while it’s not open source, I have zero desire to give it the final polish it needs because I see how I get about a hundred AI bot signups every day, and I have no energy to fight that. I don’t think Invobi is long for this world, and I think as far as web / scrapable / bot-infested software goes, I’m just not interested in making or maintaining any.
I’ve created a version of Invobi that’s just a MCP server, and I’m contemplating replacing invobi.com with a static landing page that sells the MCP server rather than a web service. Scrape that all you want, bots!
And so much like the title of this post gives on, a lone developer cannot possibly hold his own next to the behemonth of liars and thieves in Silicon Valley, who profit off of your creations to then actively try to put you out of a job, and I have no interest in swimming against the stream so whatever software I end up making going forward will be closed-source and proprietory.
I’ll keep my open source sofware up and available, of course, for however long I can considering the constant AI bot DDOS-ing of servers, and I will still continue to be a monthly sponsor of Clojurists Together. I just most likely won’t be creating or updating any of the open source software of mine any longer.