Comment by throwaway17_17

I think your comment leads to discussing a distinct third ‘cause’ for open source development: where a developer realizes their ambition is greater than their abilities, either in the technical sense or (more likely) in the sense that a single developer stands no realistic chance of ever completing an implementation of the idea alone.

For this class of open source development the authors essentially require the contributions and gifts of others for the project to even be realizable. I think this is the underlying basis for open source’s move toward a more “community” development model. It has led to open source being viewed by many as requiring a community and a “managed” community at that, to be open source. I think this class of open source is going to be impacted the most by LLM ‘assisted’ development (no matter how much distaste it generates for me and many others), where the hurdles of large scale development are more in reach (seemingly) for solo or very small groups of developers.

The really interesting thing is going to be to see how many of these projects move toward the Carmack ‘gift’ model and look to leave the community-centric model behind as an unnecessary externality.