Just recently I saw a post go past on Mastodon, complaining about the author's perception that there was a breakdown of trust in the FOSS world, in respect to the use of AI to work on FOSS projects, or at least the willingness to accept AI-assisted contributions. The post also highlighted the author's reliance on FOSS projects and how they're driven by ethical and financial motivations (some emphasis was placed on how they had no money to spend on these things so it wasn't even necessarily a choice to FOSS up their environment).
This was, of course, in response to the current fuss about how Vim is being developed these days.
I don't want to comment on the Vim stuff -- I've got no dog in that fight -- but something about the post I mention above got me thinking, and troubled me.
Back when I first ran into the concept of Free Software, before the concept of Open Source had ever been thought of, I can remember reading stuff opposed to the idea that mostly worked along the lines of "you get what you pay for" -- the implication being that Free Software would be bad software. I think it's fair to say that history has now shown that this isn't the case.
But... I think it's fair to say that you do get what you pay for, but in a different sense.
If your computing environment is fully reliant on the time, money and effort of others; reliant on people who are willing to give all of that without the realistic expectation of any contribution back from you; I feel it's safe to say that you are getting a bloody good deal. To then question the motivations and abilities of those people, because they are exploring and embracing other methods of working, is at best a bad-faith argument and at worst betrays a deep sense of entitlement.
What I also found wild was, the post went on to document the author's concerns that they now have to worry about the ability of FOSS project maintainers to detect bad contributions. This for me suggests a lack of understanding of how non-trivial FOSS projects have worked ever since it was a thing.
I mean, sure, there are some projects that are incredibly useful and which have a solo developer working away (sometimes because nobody else wants to contribute, but also sometimes because that solo developer doesn't play well with others -- you pick which scenario you think is more healthy), but for the most part the "important" projects have multitudes working on them, with contributions coming from many people of varying levels of ability. The point here being that, all along, you've been relying on the discernment and mentoring abilities of those maintainers.
To suggest they're suddenly unworthy of your trust because they might be "using the AIs" is... well, it feels driven by dogma and it reads like a disingenuous take.
Don't get me wrong though: you are right to be suspicious, you are right to want to question the trust you place in those who donate so much to you; almost always this is made explicit in the licence they extended to you in the first place. But to suggest that suddenly they're unworthy of your trust because they're donating so much value to you in a way you don't approve of...
...well, perhaps it's time for you to pay it back?