Howard Chu @ Symas@hyc@mastodon.social

The #Monero Project uses Pieter Hintjens' Collective Code Construction Contract rfc.zeromq.org/spec/22/ as the basis of its project/contribution rules. With all respect to my friend Pieter who is sorely missed, I think this C4 contract was written for a different era, and is problematic today.

This clause in particular: "Everyone, without distinction or discrimination, SHALL have an equal right to become a Contributor under the terms of this contract." is harmful, IMO.

rfc.zeromq.org/spec/22/
rfc.zeromq.org22/C4The Collective Code Construction Contract (C4) is an evolution of the github.com Fork + Pull Model, aimed at providing an optimal collaboration model for free software projects. This is revision 1 of the C4 specification. Note: this RFC is superceded by http://rfc.zeromq.org/spec:42/C4 License Copyright (c) 2009-2015 Pieter Hintjens. This Specification is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.
Howard Chu @ Symas@hyc@mastodon.social

Replying to @⁨hyc@mastodon.social⁩

10, 15 years ago, it was normal that the only people poking around in your project's code were people who had a vested interest in it - users primarily, who also were competent developers. It made sense to welcome all contributions because they most likely came from people motivated to be active in the project community. Even if they were novices, putting in the effort to guide them was likely to pay off in the long run, growing the project's talent pool.

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Howard Chu @ Symas@hyc@mastodon.social

Replying to @⁨hyc@mastodon.social⁩

That all started to change with the advent of bug bounties - people started poring thru code bases just looking for a quick payoff, not because they had any interest in the code, nor any desire to use it or participate in the project community.

And fast forward to today where we get deluged with AI-generated slop. Again, the humans driving the AIs have no interest in the projects themselves.

Stefan Arentz 🇳🇱 🇨🇦@st3fan@mastodon.social

Replying to @⁨hyc@mastodon.social⁩

@hyc

I really wish high profile open source project maintainers like yourself would take a breath and a step back and reflect on this tp come up with some better solutions than ranting about burning it all own and declaring anything and everything as an AI cancer.

I know that purely negative sentiment resonates well in this echo chamber but it is not productive and not impactful.

You can run your project how you want of course.

Stefan Arentz 🇳🇱 🇨🇦@st3fan@mastodon.social

Replying to @⁨hyc@mastodon.social⁩

@hyc If that is how you think about it then you can simply write:

"Only contributors with a long term investment in this project are welcome. We do not accept contributions from people who just want to make a small improvement and then move on."

It is completely absurd and set the bar to such an impossible height but you can do what you want as a project owner! Good luck with that kind of thinking!