> that make the software useful, usable, and updated

There is a lot of OSS software out there (e.g. in scientific communities) that I would say would barely qualify for each of those three attributes. The main reason it's valuable for the respective communities, is because it's the only thing that's available.

Seems to me this would get easier or harder depending on how you write the code. Like if you write the code in something standard and unchanging like POSIX shell scripts or C99 or ES5 javascript, at least the ecosystem won't change out from under you. If you use rust or python or a bunch of node.js dependencies then you might have to edit the project just to keep up with ecosystem changes.

yeah I had this happen to me. Except when I go to maintain it, now cursor/claude are good enough to essentially handle it on their own, so it turns out to be very low effort to maintain.

Maybe? I ran across an old pre-LLM project of mine recently, and past me was an asshole and didn't leave a readme for future me. Meanwhile post-LLM projects at least have a readme that the LLM generated for me or my agent to read and pick up context on. Being able to ask an agent what is this repo, what's going on here? Hey just make it do this, instead of toilsomely digging in and doing it tmmyself, seems to say that might not come to pass.

There is, of course, the question of if that's making me dumber. It might be, but there are other brain training things I'm doing outside of that to force my brain to do the thing.

alternatively, you might end up in 'good enough heaven' and not have to touch it for a decade because, you know, it does exactly as you need and you're not google, microsoft, openAI or antrhopic.

I'd bet there's far more 'good enoughs' than anything else out there. One of the reasons microsoft office is constantly churning subscription, etc is because they solved good enough decades ago and need to justify valuations that just don't matter for most of their user's use cases.

Not everyone is a software developer having to churn out the 101th SaaS that's just because some MBA refuses to hire a dev.

In the old world, this was because keeping in sync with upstream was hard. In the new world, it takes an hour. And because you're the only user, you can test in prod. Makes the whole thing faster. I have lots of forked and family-only software. Some are abandoned upstream etc.

As cost to software goes to zero, these things become easily possible. In the past, I'd only fork top-quality software (things like `xsv` etc. which is easy to edit. These days even complex PHP software I fork with little trouble.

With lots of software, the value is in the data model and algorithm choices. Sometimes I even just point Claude Code / Codex at an open-source thing I want to vendor some functionality into my personal setup with and it gives me what I want. The hard part for me is modeling the data well. That takes experience with encountering things and it's hard to replicate the edges. LLMs often don't get the rough bits right. But someone else's hard work usually has accounted for this.

I'm guilty of creating a fork that just goes off the rails, but still needs to keep up with upstream. I do it via a skill and seems to work good enough for now: https://github.com/midasvo/findroid-ce/tree/main/.claude/ski...

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Doesn't have to be "every person and company, in unison, in a grand conspiracy" and other such strawmen.

We could try steelmaning this argument instead: it's enough that most big companies who would otherwise have incentives to contribute.

Before FOSS got in fashion, around the early 2000s, most commercial companies wouldn't touch it as contributors and were openly avert to it, and to open sourcing their stuff. This can be the case again.