[TeriyakiBomb]

It's inevitable that more projects follow this path.

The elephant in the room is so many projects already operate like this without formally announcing it.

If you look at Blender, one of the biggest and most successful OSS projects out there, it's effectively run as source available. Some PRs make it through, but for the most part there have been heavy barriers to entry to get your work into the product. In this example, it's been key to such a large and complex project with millions of users staying afloat. It's an inconvenient truth.

It's one of those unspoken things in open source - the bigger the project the less you can accept or vet contributions. The less able you are to respond to users because there are too many. The amount of code you need to own balloons. The signal to noise to too much. LLMs have massively exacerbated this issue.

[account42]

It's not "source available", that term already has a different meaning. The cathedral development model doesn't make the result any less open source or free software.

[TeriyakiBomb]

That’s why I said “effectively run as” rather than is. Cathedral does make contribution to software less open, that’s kind of its entire deal and what I’m talking about here. It doesn’t make it any less free, but then a good number of software companies sell access and closed versions of open source projects, so we continue to split hairs.