

It may feel that way, but it’s not an asshole move. We are all struggling with mental health and existential dread in the face of what sometimes seems to be a genuine polycrisis that includes an AI apocalypse. Some people deal with this stress more effectively than others, but it doesn’t make someone an asshole when they just can’t take it anymore and you’ve gotta expect some people are going to crash out pretty hard. This is a lot milder than how some people are going to inevitably crash out, and this is not going to be the only situation like this.




Maybe they have reasons, maybe they’re good reasons, maybe they’re not. It doesn’t matter, because we aren’t entitled to know why they don’t want to release the code, and we aren’t entitled to the code either. Nobody should be obligated to open source their code (unless money has changed hands). It’s not exactly proprietary cutting edge research that will take decades to rediscover and reimplement.
I’m sorry, but I hate how people think free services that never promised to be open source, don’t ask anything of you, don’t take advantage of you, and don’t sell your data, somehow because they got popular because of that, makes them owe the community even more than anyone would ever believe that exploitive freemium or even paid, commercial software does. Nobody’s pretending that Adobe owes us the source code because millions of people paid for Photoshop. We all acknowledge they’re an asshole, but we know we’re not getting the source code and many people still pay for it.
So why does a free website owe its community even more than that? Like the fact that they were kind and generous to the community for a few years means they are now obligated to be a complete doormat and give you everything you want from them upon request or be called an asshole? They don’t get any personal rights and if they try to have any, they’re an asshole, but commercial software does it all the time and it’s okay because it’s just expected that commercial software is going to be an asshole? WTF? We just call anybody who doesn’t give us their source code upon request an asshole? Shut down the whole internet and from now on only provide services that are completely open source from day 1? Sure, sounds great. Anyone who’s got code you like and is just trying to survive this capitalist dystopia without releasing all their source code for free is an asshole, fuck them. Got it.