There is also the fact that Maintainers simply don't need contributions any more. This I've noticed also happens at work. Everyone is maintaining their own mini stacks of things. Contribution is up cooperation is down. Why go talk to a colleague when you can talk to Claude? Change is everywhere.
Right, I feel like this is more of the forcing function here rather than generic spam. Open source used to work because operational code was expensive, and it made sense to share. Now, operational code is dirt cheap. Furthermore, you can customize anything to your hearts content now with zero additional effort, so it’s more desirable to make your own solution.
And even if a contribution is helpful (like a feature you hadn’t thought of or a bug you hadn’t encountered) you’re better off writing the change yourself.
This is something that has been a problem for quite some time within the modded-Minecraft community that I'm a part of: it's highly generational, as in, upstreaming is exceptionally rare. Each server is a fork, or a fork of a fork, etc, resulting in lineages of servers like a family tree. It's very typical for multiple servers to encounter the same (or similar) problem(s) and create their own solutions, like convergent evolution.
There was an attempt to start upstreaming changes to a more centralised, ancestor repo, but this failed almost immediately. Why? Well, whoever owns that upstream will naturally want a say in, and thus will exert control over, what gets merged in. The best case scenario is that you create a whole bunch of work for yourself to conform your code whatever arbitrary requirements upstream demands, or; the worst case scenario is that you effectively cede control over what gets run on your server. But this begs the question: why doesn't upstream just pull from downstream? It's all open source, after all, and yet it almost never happens.
It's been a couple years since then and things have only gotten worse: servers are no longer accepting many (if any) community contributions anymore, instead relying on in-house developers. In a sense, these mods are no longer open source, but rather source available: the vast majority of updates come whenever the sole dev-admin has one of their code-binge days.
Anyway, I think something similar is happening here, with open source more generally, particularly with the advent of AI: any outside contribution is just creating work for you; it's probably going to have its idiosyncrasies from its author; features that you wont want to support or spend time tearing out or waiting for them to tear it out; etc. So if you want a feature, you might as well do it yourself, or get an LLM to do it since it'll probably generate something good enough, without complaint, and without much delay.
Thanks for that perspective! I think that dynamic is present in quite a lot of other communities too, especially the ones who have not traditionally embraced open source. You also see it a lot around creative / artsy work where it almost seems to be a faux pas to share anything but the final product. People do recreate things or just are inspired by other work. Coming from open source software it always seemed like wasted potential to me, but that's probably just my bias.
> In a sense, these mods are no longer open source, but rather source available
I understand what sense you mean, but the terms "open source" and "source available" have very clear definitions, and it has nothing to do with accepting contributions or not, only with the license the code is published under. So in a sense only about downstream effects; upstream effects are still a courtesy also with open source.
Cheap development is not equal to cheap maintenance. It is easy to generate the code but verification, acceptance criteria, documentation and maintenance are the real cost.
