If you don’t know what you are doing, and you give it a vague request hoping it will automatically solve your problem, then you will just have to spend even more time to debug its given code.

However, if you know exactly what needs do do, and give it a good prompt, then it will reward you with a very well written code, clean implementation and comments. Consider it an intern or junior developer.

Example of bad prompt: My code won’t work [paste the code], I keep having this error [paste the error log], please help me

Example of (reasonably) good prompt: This code introduces deep recursion and can sometimes cause a “maximum stack size exceeded” error in certain cases. Please help me convert it to use a while loop instead.

And not to forget that sketchy AI training on every line of your code.

I don’t mind AI learning from my open-source code that much. However, my concern is that open-source projects on GitHub are not as easily accessible to AIs other than Copilot and OpenAI, which does not allow for fair competition.

That said, I do have a good impression of Codeberg. When they become federated, I might finally jump ship from GitHub.

Yes, I’ve just reread it, and while I completely disagree with the issue creator’s attitude, he does have a point:

you also removed all the old versions that were released under an open source license so that others couldn’t continue to use out-of-support versions

I haven’t verify if this is true of not, but this is just not necessary. If the author stops providing pre-built binary for newer release versions, so be it. But I think it is a little too much aggressive from the author to delete old release versions as well.

As an open source software maintainer myself, I don’t quite agree with some of the points.

I also always believed that if you ever started a project that is valuable for companies, they would support you in return

For me, I do ask for donations, of course, because life is hard and who doesn’t want money? Especially when you deserve it. But I never expect anyone to make a donation. It’s only when someone actually does it that I feel so much happiness. Some leave a thank you comment and stated that they cannot support me financially, and I’m also perfectly happy with that.

All I got was complaints.

I see it as feature requests and bug reports, and are another kind of contribution. Note that some of the people may seem rude, it could be because they are simply bad at English (as am I) and try their best to write a short sentence. Some may not familiar to GitHub and talk about their problems in an unrelated issue. In that case I simply try my best to understand and kindly answer them, and guide them to the right direction.

It may seem to you that open source is great because it’s free to use. Truth is, it certainly is not free.

I use open source software for free, and I want to pay it back by contributing more to open source. I don’t forget that my own open source projects also have a lot of other open source components in them, all for free. I don’t like to force people to pay for my softwares in order to use it.

Of course, my open source projects will forever be hobby projects, I can never make them into a serious business nor work on them full-time, but I’m fine with that.

It’s sad that a lot of the username come from Vietnam (my country). I remember when the Stellar airdrop announced there were people trying to buy GitHub account for 3-5$ for “their company’s project”. Many people do the thing that called “MMO” like that here, that doesn’t realistically provide any value. They just want to get rich as fast as possible with only simple jobs such as copy and paste.

Wait until they replace the second option of the Desktop right click menu to something AI.