>As long as there's somebody in their bedroom hacking out a project for themselves, that then decides to share it somehow on the internet, it's still alive.
You don't even need somebody. AI agents themselves can make and share projects.
> AI agents themselves can make and share projects
Copyright can't be assigned yo agents. You cant have Open Source without copyright as the enforcement mechanism. Millions of AI-generated, public-domain projects with no social proof to distinguish them is uncharted territory. My prediction is it would be shit-territory amd worse than what we have currently.
>You cant have Open Source without copyright as the enforcement mechanism.
Enforce what. Attribution? Open Source software doesn't requires software to require attribution for it to be considered open source. Public domain software can be open source.
The license. Public domain and open source are distinct, IMO, legally, and with regards to communities (or lack thereof).
> Public domain software can be open source.
Maybe? I can't name a single public domain project off the top of my head, but I can name at least a couple for each of the Apache, BSD-/MIT-style[1] or GPL licenses.
I got curious on how they solved contributions since "public domain" means different things in different jurisdictions[0] - unlike copyright. It turns out they didn't solve it - there's a subsection on the SQLite that declares it is "Open Source, nor Open Contribution[1]". Much like Android, this follows the letter of Open Source, but not the spirit of it.
I'll stand by my earlier assertion; wrangling public domain AI contributions is an even gnarlier problem to solve.
0. Indeed, it may even be non-existent. Maintainers would want to protect the project from being "infected" by contributions with permaglued-copyright.
You don't even need somebody. AI agents themselves can make and share projects.