- Joined
- Jul 7, 2026
IDK where to put this but Dragonminded, the creator of Libdragon, a modern SDK for Nintendo 64 software development that I and everybody in N64 homebrew frequently uses, is quitting development for virtually all xir projects. Reasons include seething over the fact that xir software is no longer obscure and elite and only usable by 15 people thanks to AI crumbling xir ivory tower (N64 homebrew used to be an extremely small and autistic scene thanks to its lack of high-level programming options that is now experiencing an Eternal September (they fully deserve this BTW. They're insufferable.)) and not being accepted as a hekkin vivaldi traiso wompa. Bonus points for screeching about DHH.
@Null is right in saying that vivaldi wompas are seething because AI is making programming accessible to more than just freaks willing to spend months learning low-level function pipelines.
This follows after it was found out that Libdragon has had AI merged into its repo for a year before anybody noticed as Dragonminded is a lazy retard and flipped the fuck out in xir Discord.
@Null is right in saying that vivaldi wompas are seething because AI is making programming accessible to more than just freaks willing to spend months learning low-level function pipelines.
October 3rd 2026, 10:06 pm
I'm no stranger to open source. My earliest foray into open source software was a framebuffer library for the Nintendo DS. I uploaded the first version of that in August of 2005 and linked it around IRC for people to play with. That catapulted into an open source career that is frankly still hard for me to believe. Twenty one years of publishing libraries, homebrew for several Nintendo systems, multiple system toolchains with associated system drivers, countless utilities for Linux, several full server collections and even some open source hardware later and I can say that I've been quite prolific. Honestly, I'm incredibly proud of the things that I accomplished and until very recently was also very proud of the software that my own contributions nurtured.
I wish I could speak as fondly about the experience as I can about what I think is my legacy. The fact of the matter is that my time in open source has largely been miserable. If I'm being honest it has felt like an abusive relationship. The ecosystem is exploitative and the participants entitled, demanding and cruel. I've been harassed and bullied, had death threats lobbed at me, had my work stolen repeatedly and routinely been pressured to spend my free time on maintenance. By and large people have not given me any positive feedback for what I've released. Generally, the only time I hear about anything is when somebody wants a thing I made to do something different or they're reporting to me that it's broken. People seem to forget that I'm a person and only see me as a collection of useful code or as an obstacle to getting their way.
I sat down the other night and tried to enumerate all of the times people have contacted me to say thank you for something I wrote and it's honestly shocking. In the 17 years that I had libdragon up I've received one email that was positive. It was somebody who had published a game using the library and wanted to thank me with free copies of the game. Contrast that to the years where I tried to get anyone interested or to help and was met with beratement, insults and harassment. My BEMANI utilities repo which has been forked private to run half a dozen private networks has never received a single thank you in the six years it's been open source. Most of the feedback I get is somebody asking me to implement a new game. A few years ago when I released a Naomi Diagnostic ROM I actually got yelled at because people thought the word "ROM" meant I was giving them some super secret leaked factory cartridge, when in reality I'd just spent years reverse-engineering the system to be able to make things like that. The list goes on and on. It's honestly depressing.
Then there's the corporate angle. Open source is seen by much of the private sector as free labor to be taken from. They choose to build on top of open source and then come along to tell the people maintaining those projects that they're part of the supply chain now. Projects that creators never asked to become universally depended on suddenly turn into recipes for burnout, exploitation and stolen labor. Corporations don't give back in the form of help or even monetary contributions (unless you're an open racist like DHH, then they'll gladly publicly fund you to the tune of millions of dollars). If you are unlucky enough to get used by a corporation it's basically the software version of "working for exposure" except many of the people doing so have found that they can't get a job in the industries that depend on their software!
I ignored these problems, mostly happy to just play in the code of whatever special interest caught my heart at the time and thinking that I was doing my part by giving back when I released each of these projects. But after every single project I did things a little bit differently to try to avoid the intensely negative background noise, negative feedback and harassment. After DSOrganize I avoided GPL'd code because I realized that not only did it remove rights from me but it attracted the sort of entitled FOSS dude that was afraid of plants but quietly believed that women didn't have a place in software. After the Naomi netboot project and my arcade DOOM port I learned not to focus on trying to give a better experience to a community because they would just keep taking and taking until you burn out. When I stopped contributing to libdragon it was because I learned that people coding N64 didn't want open source if it meant they had to contribute as well and that they were happy to pirate official devkits until such time as I finished every single feature they demanded. When I gave up trying to improve MAME I noted that no good deed goes unpunishsed and that if you try to be helpful you will step on the toes of assholes who see you as a threat to their control. When I burned out on bemaniutils I learned that my mistake was making software that people who wanted fiefdoms to control could easily snatch and setup, filing the serial numbers off and claiming they did it.
And then came LLMs. A big thing I learned over my tenure in open source was that the best way to not get exploited for your labor was to make things that were both hostile to capital and useful to individuals. So I built things that could not reasonably be sold and would not be of any use to corporations but were still useful to people and communities. I worked on libraries and addons and utilities and services that were too niche to become the next log4j or the next LibCST yet still let individual people do cool things. I did that very intentionally to minimize the amount of drive-by labor theft but also in the hopes that some of the people who found it useful would connect and contribute. Sure, open source is full of people that will grab your library and just start using it, only to pop back in and demand bug fixes. But those were the people that I was publishing for. I would very much have liked them to give me positive feedback once in awhile and I would very much have liked people to collaborate with me instead of just throwing PRs at me. But I was mostly happy that people were using my work at all. LLMs changed all that. Tech figured out a way to extract value from my work anyway by scraping all of it to train their plagiarism machines and then sell that slop to people.
The thing about vibe coders is that they're the natural conclusion to where open source was going for a long time. These same people that feel entitled to the stolen valor of their slop commits previously felt entitled to your time and software. The people that are vibe coding things that look suspiciously like your software with the serials filed off were previously forking your code without so much as a "thanks". The same people that expect accolades for being a meat proxy were previously putting up PRs that didn't work and expecting maintainers to fix it for them. There was always a high degree of exploitation and theft in open source; LLMs simply ramped things up exponentially. But AI enables one thing that wasn't possible before: it's directly monetized that exploitation in the favor of tech. LLMs represent an astonishing theft of labor and concentration of wealth in the hands of a very few. The insult upon injury is that none of us gave away all of this work so that AI companies could steal it wholesale to sell to other capitalists.
I'm hardly the first person to point out these problems with open source. I am guaranteed not to be the last. There's really nothing I can do about it. I've been on the fence about giving up on open source for the last few months as I've watched project after project betray everyone by selling out to AI companies. Watching people tell you LLMs are the future while you sit here with twenty years of work stolen for that future doesn't sit well at all. I now realize that there's never been a point where open source wasn't miserable. I had just ignored that because I wanted to believe in a version of open source that was community focused and enabled all of us to lift each other. I wanted to believe in an open source that liberated computing while making space for marginalized people that are increasingly shut out of corporate spaces. I wanted to believe in an open source that was punk and embodied the hacker spirit. Sure, there have been points where open source has done that incidentally and a few projects that have intentionally built inclusive and rich communities. But it's clear to me that this was never the goal. The goal, as far as I can tell, was just to normalize giving away hundreds of hours of labor and I fell for it.
So where do I go from here? Well, open source has been a pretty big hobby of mine for quite some time. But if I'm being honest with myself, nothing changes if I simply don't release the source anymore. I'm still going to be coding things for myself regardless of whether I share them or not. Most of my projects have effectively zero people using them so the only thing they're doing being online is giving AI companies more free training data to sell back to everyone. I still believe you should have the right to inspect the code of things that run on your computer so I am not going to go back to only releasing binaries. I also think that community can be created around good pieces of software and not at the expense of the maintainer. However, that doesn't mean I need to make my work freely available. Over the next couple months as I find the energy I'll be taking down almost all of my repositories from GitHub. For the few that have contributions or an actual userbase I'll be looking into self-hosting git so that I can give access to the code to people that are actually interested in the work.
I'm tired both physically and emotionally. I feel exploited, used and betrayed. The trust I extended when releasing my work is completely shattered. It's finally obvious to me that this relationship is abusive, so I'm breaking up. Goodbye, open source. I don't actually think I'll miss you.
I'm no stranger to open source. My earliest foray into open source software was a framebuffer library for the Nintendo DS. I uploaded the first version of that in August of 2005 and linked it around IRC for people to play with. That catapulted into an open source career that is frankly still hard for me to believe. Twenty one years of publishing libraries, homebrew for several Nintendo systems, multiple system toolchains with associated system drivers, countless utilities for Linux, several full server collections and even some open source hardware later and I can say that I've been quite prolific. Honestly, I'm incredibly proud of the things that I accomplished and until very recently was also very proud of the software that my own contributions nurtured.
I wish I could speak as fondly about the experience as I can about what I think is my legacy. The fact of the matter is that my time in open source has largely been miserable. If I'm being honest it has felt like an abusive relationship. The ecosystem is exploitative and the participants entitled, demanding and cruel. I've been harassed and bullied, had death threats lobbed at me, had my work stolen repeatedly and routinely been pressured to spend my free time on maintenance. By and large people have not given me any positive feedback for what I've released. Generally, the only time I hear about anything is when somebody wants a thing I made to do something different or they're reporting to me that it's broken. People seem to forget that I'm a person and only see me as a collection of useful code or as an obstacle to getting their way.
I sat down the other night and tried to enumerate all of the times people have contacted me to say thank you for something I wrote and it's honestly shocking. In the 17 years that I had libdragon up I've received one email that was positive. It was somebody who had published a game using the library and wanted to thank me with free copies of the game. Contrast that to the years where I tried to get anyone interested or to help and was met with beratement, insults and harassment. My BEMANI utilities repo which has been forked private to run half a dozen private networks has never received a single thank you in the six years it's been open source. Most of the feedback I get is somebody asking me to implement a new game. A few years ago when I released a Naomi Diagnostic ROM I actually got yelled at because people thought the word "ROM" meant I was giving them some super secret leaked factory cartridge, when in reality I'd just spent years reverse-engineering the system to be able to make things like that. The list goes on and on. It's honestly depressing.
Then there's the corporate angle. Open source is seen by much of the private sector as free labor to be taken from. They choose to build on top of open source and then come along to tell the people maintaining those projects that they're part of the supply chain now. Projects that creators never asked to become universally depended on suddenly turn into recipes for burnout, exploitation and stolen labor. Corporations don't give back in the form of help or even monetary contributions (unless you're an open racist like DHH, then they'll gladly publicly fund you to the tune of millions of dollars). If you are unlucky enough to get used by a corporation it's basically the software version of "working for exposure" except many of the people doing so have found that they can't get a job in the industries that depend on their software!
I ignored these problems, mostly happy to just play in the code of whatever special interest caught my heart at the time and thinking that I was doing my part by giving back when I released each of these projects. But after every single project I did things a little bit differently to try to avoid the intensely negative background noise, negative feedback and harassment. After DSOrganize I avoided GPL'd code because I realized that not only did it remove rights from me but it attracted the sort of entitled FOSS dude that was afraid of plants but quietly believed that women didn't have a place in software. After the Naomi netboot project and my arcade DOOM port I learned not to focus on trying to give a better experience to a community because they would just keep taking and taking until you burn out. When I stopped contributing to libdragon it was because I learned that people coding N64 didn't want open source if it meant they had to contribute as well and that they were happy to pirate official devkits until such time as I finished every single feature they demanded. When I gave up trying to improve MAME I noted that no good deed goes unpunishsed and that if you try to be helpful you will step on the toes of assholes who see you as a threat to their control. When I burned out on bemaniutils I learned that my mistake was making software that people who wanted fiefdoms to control could easily snatch and setup, filing the serial numbers off and claiming they did it.
And then came LLMs. A big thing I learned over my tenure in open source was that the best way to not get exploited for your labor was to make things that were both hostile to capital and useful to individuals. So I built things that could not reasonably be sold and would not be of any use to corporations but were still useful to people and communities. I worked on libraries and addons and utilities and services that were too niche to become the next log4j or the next LibCST yet still let individual people do cool things. I did that very intentionally to minimize the amount of drive-by labor theft but also in the hopes that some of the people who found it useful would connect and contribute. Sure, open source is full of people that will grab your library and just start using it, only to pop back in and demand bug fixes. But those were the people that I was publishing for. I would very much have liked them to give me positive feedback once in awhile and I would very much have liked people to collaborate with me instead of just throwing PRs at me. But I was mostly happy that people were using my work at all. LLMs changed all that. Tech figured out a way to extract value from my work anyway by scraping all of it to train their plagiarism machines and then sell that slop to people.
The thing about vibe coders is that they're the natural conclusion to where open source was going for a long time. These same people that feel entitled to the stolen valor of their slop commits previously felt entitled to your time and software. The people that are vibe coding things that look suspiciously like your software with the serials filed off were previously forking your code without so much as a "thanks". The same people that expect accolades for being a meat proxy were previously putting up PRs that didn't work and expecting maintainers to fix it for them. There was always a high degree of exploitation and theft in open source; LLMs simply ramped things up exponentially. But AI enables one thing that wasn't possible before: it's directly monetized that exploitation in the favor of tech. LLMs represent an astonishing theft of labor and concentration of wealth in the hands of a very few. The insult upon injury is that none of us gave away all of this work so that AI companies could steal it wholesale to sell to other capitalists.
I'm hardly the first person to point out these problems with open source. I am guaranteed not to be the last. There's really nothing I can do about it. I've been on the fence about giving up on open source for the last few months as I've watched project after project betray everyone by selling out to AI companies. Watching people tell you LLMs are the future while you sit here with twenty years of work stolen for that future doesn't sit well at all. I now realize that there's never been a point where open source wasn't miserable. I had just ignored that because I wanted to believe in a version of open source that was community focused and enabled all of us to lift each other. I wanted to believe in an open source that liberated computing while making space for marginalized people that are increasingly shut out of corporate spaces. I wanted to believe in an open source that was punk and embodied the hacker spirit. Sure, there have been points where open source has done that incidentally and a few projects that have intentionally built inclusive and rich communities. But it's clear to me that this was never the goal. The goal, as far as I can tell, was just to normalize giving away hundreds of hours of labor and I fell for it.
So where do I go from here? Well, open source has been a pretty big hobby of mine for quite some time. But if I'm being honest with myself, nothing changes if I simply don't release the source anymore. I'm still going to be coding things for myself regardless of whether I share them or not. Most of my projects have effectively zero people using them so the only thing they're doing being online is giving AI companies more free training data to sell back to everyone. I still believe you should have the right to inspect the code of things that run on your computer so I am not going to go back to only releasing binaries. I also think that community can be created around good pieces of software and not at the expense of the maintainer. However, that doesn't mean I need to make my work freely available. Over the next couple months as I find the energy I'll be taking down almost all of my repositories from GitHub. For the few that have contributions or an actual userbase I'll be looking into self-hosting git so that I can give access to the code to people that are actually interested in the work.
I'm tired both physically and emotionally. I feel exploited, used and betrayed. The trust I extended when releasing my work is completely shattered. It's finally obvious to me that this relationship is abusive, so I'm breaking up. Goodbye, open source. I don't actually think I'll miss you.
This follows after it was found out that Libdragon has had AI merged into its repo for a year before anybody noticed as Dragonminded is a lazy retard and flipped the fuck out in xir Discord.
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