Most of that "public data from the Internet" is subject to licenses, yet their entire business model is built on top of a legally grey algorithm that ingests that licensed code and spits it back out without the license. They have no legal right to any of that code, they're just getting away with it because laws are for the poor.
If you believe any data that is publicly accessible is fair game regardless of licenses, then by that definition, Claude Code's source code is included.
Why does an open source project, apparently developed by a handful of core developers, have a "board", a "membership committee", "elections" etc? And why do these include people who do not contribute directly to development at all?
Let me guess, these same people also pushed to introduce a "code of conduct" to the project?
From the article: "These days some at TDF seem to emphasize equality instead."
I'm not sure exactly what is meant by that. My guess, having some experience with board-sitter parasites, is they're just appealing to empty principles to create the illusion of being important to the organization, because they're unable or unwilling to make more tangible and substantial contributions.
When somebody can't justify their role with the quality of their work, they look for other justifications instead. Ideological justifications work best because they aren't provable and anybody who questions the value of the supposed ideological contributions can simply be dismissed as being ideologically opposed (see: the sibling comment accusing you of ideological alignment with gamergate, even though libreoffice has nothing to do with gaming.)
For instance, suppose I am a useless parasite who decides to embed myself into the local school board; I have nothing of real value to contribute to such an organization, but maybe I want the role for the clout. Instead of doing something real, I could instead say that my role on the board is to advance the cause of equality. Anybody who says I'm useless can be construed as opposing equality. Anybody who tried to measure the actual equality in the org before and after my arrival can be dismissed because measuring equality is hard to do objectively.
(I learned most of this from a few relatives of mine, who are such board-seeking parasites. By the way, parasite board sitters can use opposition to "woke" in the way they use championing the cause of equality; both cynical empty words used to distract people from the lack of real, substantial and demonstrable contributions. Anybody who complains can be accused of being woke. It works exactly the same regardless of what flavor of disguise the parasite chooses.)
tl;dr Germans and coordination while mitigating takeover risk (ironically)
StarOffice was a German office suite bought by Sun Microsystems in 1999. Sun open-sourced it in 2000 as OpenOffice.org, which became the major free alternative to Microsoft Office through the 2000s. Sun kept significant control. They owned the trademark, required copyright assignment for contributions, and steered the project's direction. Many community contributors were uneasy with this arrangement but tolerated it because Sun was broadly seen as a good-faith actor.
Oracle acquired Sun in 2010. Oracle had a reputation for being far more aggressive about monetizing and controlling its acquisitions (the Java/Google lawsuit being another example). The OpenOffice.org community had already been frustrated by years of slow decision-making and corporate gatekeeping, and Oracle's arrival made the situation feel untenable.
A group of prominent community members and corporate contributors (including people from Red Hat, Novell/SUSE, Canonical, and Google) announced The Document Foundation in Sep 2010 and forked the codebase as LibreOffice. Oracle eventually donated the OpenOffice.org code to Apache but LibreOffice quickly became the version that mattered.
The reason they had to fork was that a single entity (first Sun, then Oracle) had unchecked power over the project. The Document Foundation was explicitly designed to prevent that. If there's no formal structure, whoever controls the servers, the domain name, the trademark, or the build infrastructure effectively controls the project. A foundation with bylaws, elected leadership, and distributed authority makes it much harder for any single company or individual to take the project hostage.
LibreOffice receives donations, employs some staff, holds trademarks, pays for infrastructure, and sponsors events. Under German law (TDF is registered in Berlin), you need a proper legal entity with accountable governance to do this. You can't just have "some developers" holding a bank account and a trademark informally. The foundation was officially incorporated on February 17, 2012.
Because to accomplish anything at scale you need organization. And organizing humans in anything other than forced labor involves respecting them, thus things like codes of conduct. These stories could be about anything and you gamergate veterans will show up grinding one of those axes. Care to throw in wild speculation about whether they use “master” as their main branch name, “slave” as backup database terminology or “allowlist”. You know, any of those things that are keeping America from being great and winning the war.
OpenBSD, a rather more complex project, seems to be doing fine without a code of conduct — in the sense bakugo employed "code of conduct," not in the generalized sensed you conflated it with in your non sequitur.
I find it just the opposite. I can think of few communities nearly as patient or welcoming to anyone who's earnest and willing to put in the work to learn; true, there's no coddling or hand-holding, and, indeed, it tends to be very direct in calling out foolishness or laziness, and can reach epic proportions when it comes to dishonesty or entitlement, but nothing which can't be processed by emotional maturity, nor the gratuitous pedanticism-fueled browbeating often seen in some I-use-foo-btw open-source communities despite their shiny CoCs.
> I find it just the opposite. I can think of few communities nearly as patient or welcoming to anyone who's earnest and willing to put in the work to learn; true, there's no coddling or hand-holding, and, indeed, it tends to be very direct in calling out foolishness or laziness,
That’s nearly the exact opposite of welcoming newbies.
To be perfectly honest, that’s fine: OpenBSD demands a steep learning curve and that you know what you’re doing.
What is? No coddling? Little tolerance toward laziness? Zero toward entitlement? That's closer to the opposite of being patronizing, I would say.
They point to documentation in response to the kind of request I've seen closed with RTFMs elsewhere. They'll expect one to read it, and try one's hand at whatever one is trying to accomplish — and they'll feel slighted by a refusal, given how much work they put into it.
And yet, they go to great, unexpected (given the fame) lengths to help someone actually making the effort; they don't try to put anyone down in order to feel bigger than they are, but they don't sugar coat things to appear more likable either.
In short, no, knowing what one is doing isn't a prerequisite; it's more about not foisting onto others the responsibility for the effort required to move from where one is to where one wants to be — whether in knowledge, maturity or tools.
In this context, what I expanded above as foisting onto others the responsibility for the effort required by what we want to accomplish.
> Why do you believe pointing to the manual is newbie friendly?
To the documentation, which may or may not be a manpage; as it's usually done in response to a request for the information contained therein, I do find it reasonable.
> OpenBSD serves an important niche, but to brand it as newbie-friendly does OpenBSD a disservice.
We're discussing OpenBSD's community, not the system itself.
> Or perhaps you mean newbie tolerant?
I meant what I wrote, that I find the community to be the opposite of "notoriously terrible and unwelcoming to newbies," by which I do not imply newbie-friendliness in a kindergarten sense.
> Because to accomplish anything at scale you need organization. And organizing humans in anything other than forced labor involves respecting them, thus things like codes of conduct.
This part of your comment was worthwhile. You should have stopped there, before starting to grind an unrelated political axe. Let's at least try to follow the "Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity." guideline, eh?
TIL open source projects simply didn't work before a certain (often big tech associated) crowd of non-contributors started forcing bureaucracy and codes of conduct down everyone's throats less than a decade ago.
What kind of human writing has "it's not X—it's Y" in every single paragraph?
The answer is none. LLMs haven't accurately modeled human writing for years, current models have been smacked on the head with the coding RLHF bat so much, they all write distinctly inhuman text.
The thing is, people are screaming “AI” when they see a single “it's not X—it's Y" pattern in a post, despite this being a fairly common construct.
People are nitpicking every tiny thing in their search for proof of AI. It’s not useful and ends up dominating the conversation. AI panic is degrading the value of forums at least as much as actual AI at this point.
Probably because most HN posts in the last six months have been written by LLMs. Not all, but that doesn't matter, the trust has been eroded to the point that clicking on an article on the front page of HN and not being immediately met with the sloppiest slop imaginable is now a standout event in my mind.
"I have an opinion and everyone on the planet agrees with me, if you disagree, you don't matter" is not a useful insight, and is, in fact, far more emotional and dismissive than any of the replies to it.
That's a horribly broken misrepresentation of what was said in the original post. If that's what you took away from it, you're not reading carefully or critically.
> No one has ever made a purchasing decision based on how good your code is.
This has since been edited (I suspect OP later realized how ridiculous of a claim it was) but it's an objectively false statement that blindly projects OP's stance on software quality onto the entire population.
People have, in fact, stopped using software because it was too slow or buggy. I've done it, many others have done it. To give you a real example, I'm a fan of JetBrains IDEs functionality-wise, but I've been seriously considering moving away from them due to how bloated and unoptimized they've become in recent years - when your IDE feels more sluggish than one built on top of Electron, something has gone seriously wrong. I don't have to actually read the code itself to know it's bad code, I can feel it by simply using the software.
Just because you don't care doesn't mean others don't. Modern society was not built by people who didn't care about their craft, nor was it built by designing everything with the lowest common denominator in mind.
All software that’s popular has hundreds or thousands of issues filed against it. It’s not an objective indication of anything other than people having issues to report and a willingness and ability to report the issue.
It doesn’t mean every issue is valid, that it contains a suggestion that can be implemented, that it can be addressed immediately, etc. The issue list might not be curated, either, resulting in a garbage heap.
For what one anecdote is worth: through casual use I've found a handful of annoying UI bugs in Claude Code, and all of them were already reported on the bug tracker and either still open, or auto-closed without a real resolution.
It's impressive how fast vibe coders seem to flip-flop between "AI can write better code than you, there's no reason to write code yourself anymore; if you do, you're stuck in the past" and "AI writes bad code but I don't care about quality and neither should you; if you care, you're stuck in the past".
I hope this leak can at least help silence the former. If you're going to flood the world with slop, at least own up to it.
If you believe any data that is publicly accessible is fair game regardless of licenses, then by that definition, Claude Code's source code is included.
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