Years ago, I used to be an open source developer.

Yes, me. Mister Japanese-language-studying amateur-theologer blog-making writer composer, etc… used to be an open source developer.

I haven’t done it for years.

And the reason why is perfectly encapsulated in the hubbub right now around Godot.

One of the “community managers” in the Godot product shot her/their/attack-helicopterer self in the foot by putting a political post on their twitter feed, and then going on a blocking spree when people rightly objected to that.

Okay, let me tell you my creds. Many years ago I was a server owner on DALnet. For a while, I was the maintainer of both their server code (of which I screwed up at least once) and their services code as well. I added a few things – I believe I was responsible for a few of the features that got propagated up to the main tree, such as GLOBOPS.

(and let me be clear: at the time I was the kind of person I am about to bash. So don’t think I’m putting myself forward as a paragon of virtue. I was a mess at the time. I can say what I want to say with some certainty because I was, at one time, a part of the problem.)

I have, since then contributed to quite a few projects, most notably KDE. I also released a few of my own, most of which are no longer available because they’re obsolete.

Anyway, in my experience, open source has three different types of people.

Type 1 – The Parasites

This is the largest group of people – I call them the leeches. These are the people who write very little code, but love to hang around the group, make a lot of noise, and try to get the project to do what they want. This is how activists get embedded in the project. They don’t have the skills to actually do any real work, so instead they become community managers or do other marginally useful stuff. They’re kind of indispensable sometimes in the sense that they do some of the busywork that the real devs don’t want to do, but they almost always have their own agenda.

Some of these parasites can code, a little, enough to pick up trouble tickets and try to fix bugs. These parasites are somewhat useful, but they’re also inordinately noisy.

These are where the activists get their foothold.

Type 2 – The Socially Inept Marginally Competent Developers

This is the second largest group of people. These are the people who love to code and tend to contribute, either casually or more than casually, but they have little to no social skills and drive other contributors (and thankfully the parasites with less intestinal fortitude) away. These people actually do help to drive the project and make it better, but they tend to make stupid policy decisions and only work on what interests them – often to the detriment of the project itself. But because projects need to take what they can get, they’re often (but not always) tolerated. I was in this category most of the time.

Type 3 – The Competent Steerers

This is usually the smallest by far group, consisting of maybe one to five people, often including the person who wrote this project in the first place. They have a very intimate knowledge of the project and are excellent coders, and have enough social acuity to keep the project on an even keel – most of the time. They also often don’t really know what the agendas of the people on their project are, so they end up having to be assholes just to keep everything on an even keel.

Put another way – most open source projects are, by necessity, absolutely dysfunctional.

Why I stopped Contributing to Open Source

So, in case it’s not clear, why did I stop contributing to open source? That’s pretty clear. There are far too many parasites, who are listened to far too much by the other two types.

Any open source project should not have a political opinion unless it was specifically written so. For example, “Get Out the Democratic Vote v 1.0” written by programmers on the DNC staff, well, you know what you’re getting. A project like, oh I don’t know, a game engine called “Godot”, has absolutely no business expressing an opinion on any social, sexual, political, or any such polarizing topic. I don’t care if you’re a furry who gets off on licking fur and coughing up hairballs, that as absolutely nothing at all with creating a decent game engines.

Put another way, you licensed your software to conservatives too.

Do I use Godot? No. I never have. It came up in passing as I was trying to find app engines for a project I want to do someday, but I currently have no use for it. And for that I am immeasurably glad, because now I will never touch it. Never. It’s polluted. It’s damaged goods. I can not trust the project to create a quality project, because they are clearly far more concerned with who sticks what in what hole (or not) than actually creating a game engine that works for everyone.

And, well… I’m composing now. None of my compositions are up for public debate. And that… that is exactly why.

Godot will collapse shortly. They deserve to. Because they’re an open source project, the project itself won’t die, but the foundation behind it will. And I could only wish that all the other projects that think it’s more important to make a social statement than create quality software will go with them. Only then will I consider contributing to open source again.

Hear that, Godot? Let me make it even simpler for you.

DON’T SHIT WHERE YOU EAT.

Thank you.

Oh, and Godot? I don’t use your software. I don’t follow you on any social media. I don’t subscribe to your Github. I have never interacted with you, and I never will. So you can’t block me. Fuck you.