The fate of "small" open source

This author assumes that open sourcing a package only delivers value if is added as a dependency. Publicly sharing code with a permissive license is still useful and a radical idea.

Yeah if I find some (small) unmaintained code I need, I will just copy it (then add in my metrics and logging standards :)

It shouldn't be a radical idea, it is how science overall works.

Also, as per the educational side, I find in modern software ecosystem, I don't want to learn everything. Excellent new things or dominantly popular new things, sure, but there are a lot of branching paths of what to learn next, and having Claude code whip up a good enough solution is fine and lets me focus on less, more deeply.

(Note: I tried leaving this comment on the blog but my phone keyboard never opened despite a lot of clicking, and on mastodon but hit the length limit).

Yep. Even just sharing code with any license is valuable. Much I have learned from reading an implementation of code I have never run even once. Solutions to tough problems are an under-recognized form of generosity.

This is a point where the lack of alignment between the free beer crowd and those they depend on is all too clear. The free beer enthusiast cannot imagine benefiting from anything other than a finished work. They are concerned about the efficient use of scarce development bandwidth without consciousness of why it is scarce or that it is not theirs to direct. They view solutions without a hot package cache as a form of waste, oblivious to how such solutions expedite the development of all other tools they depend on, commercial or free.

I do agree with this, but there are some caveats. At the end of the day it is time people invest into a project. And that is often unpaid time.

Now, that does not mean it has no value, but it is a trade-off. After about 14 years, for instance, I retired permanently from rubygems.org in 2024 due to the 100k download limit (and now I wouldn't use it after the shameful moves RubyCentral did, as well as the new shiny corporate rules with which I couldn't operate within anyway; it is now a private structure owned by Shopify. Good luck finding people who want to invest their own unpaid spare time into anything tainted by corporations here).

A copyleft license is much better because it ensures that it will remain open and in most cases large companies won't use it, making sure they will have to shell out the money to hire someone to do it instead.