by on April 15, 2026
Update: We see this has gotten much immediate response on the Fediverse/ActivityPub. We worry that folks didn't read until the end. The point of this post is to propose some thoughts and invite everyone to two real-time discussions on:
$ date -d '2026-04-21 15:00 UTC'
$ date -d '2026-04-28 23:00 UTC'
(More details on the real-time discussions at the end of the post.) We'll meantime do our best to engage in the places where folks have commented, but we hope folks will bring the outcome of those discussions to a real-time discussion. Original post follows:
Many people may recall Eternal September (in 1993) — when Usenet membership increased overwhelmingly — marking the annual September rush of student joins. The ensuing moderation challenges changed the culture of Usenet (the largest Internet discussion fora back then). Many early Usenet adopters left; they reconnected with their communities elsewhere. While this onslaught of “newbies” knew little of Usenet's traditional cultural norms, they nonetheless benefitted greatly from these novel connections to discuss and learn together with people worldwide. The times were turbulent then, but eventually new cultural norms emerged.
Today, a similar cultural change is afoot. I call it Eternal November. November 2025 — the month of Opus 4.5's release — has been widely identified as a similar inflection point: LLM-backed generative AI coding tools made a substantial leap to increased usefulness. A new wave of software developers — unfamiliar with traditional FOSS development culture — are innovating quickly. Their progress is sometimes in spite of those historical cultural norms.
We're all tempted — as we were in 1993 — to shun these “newbies” and reject their contributions aggressively. But what is really going on here? As in 1993, good and well-intentioned people discovered newly interesting and hitherto unexplored ways to interact and engage with computing. FOSS's old guard naturally feels angst, concern, and even fear. We curated our norms over decades. But these norms are not sacrosanct. I urge us to reluctantly but seriously embrace this opportunity. We have much to teach these newcomers, and we must resist our arrogance of experience in assuming they've nothing to teach us.
I encourage all of us in the FOSS community to welcome the new software developers who've adopted these tools, investigate their motivations, and seriously consider cautiously and carefully incorporating their workflows with ours. Seasoned software developers understand the benefits and limitations of LLM-assisted coding tools: we've studied for a few years the maintainability costs they incur, and the dangers of their flagrant, undisciplined use. Some new software developers won't care about maintainability, just as many startups today don't care when they're making a proof of concept. Depending on the use case, this might actually be ok, for a one-off experiment or something else that only one person will ever use.
FOSS maintainers have decried for decades how few upstream contributions they receive. Maintainers today mostly bemoan the “AI slop”, and I agree that the slop is, at best, raw material to make an actual contribution. We must seek the goal of engagement to increase human collaboration (and thus maintainability). It is our job to recognize these, to communicate them, and to help new software developers build maintainable projects, when maintainability is desired, and to identify when a less maintainable one-person fork for private use might be better. We must perpetually service the airplane while flying it: maintain the projects we have while create the FOSS communities of the future inside those projects. Only this approach ensures FOSS will thrive and flourish.
Building these new FOSS communities is now just one aspect of software freedom. Historically, software freedom has has typically necessitated interacting with others, since changes you made on your own were difficult to maintain out-of-tree, and the work of writing the software changes themselves generally dwarfed the work of getting those software changes accepted into the project they modified. However, with the ability to re-base changes more easily with LLM-backed generative AI coding tools (and the ease with which changes can be made generally) there is less of a natural tendency for people to work with existing FOSS communities. And we should be ok with that!
This is not to say we shouldn't encourage people to contribute to FOSS projects, and join those communities. However, we do need to recognize when someone is ready and interested in doing that (and willing to put in a bit of extra time to help others), and when they just want to do a thing on their own, and that's fine for them.
By recognizing what new technologies can do well, and what they can't, and how this differs from the technologies of the past, we can not only adapt our communities to these changes, but also take advantage of the new wave of people who are excited about our craft, and how they can improve personal autonomy for themselves and others. It took time, but we adapted to the Eternal September. We can learn from that experience and do it again. The first steps are to recognize rapid changes, consider how they can benefit society, and then patiently and open-mindedly bring our ideals and extensive knowledge to the table to accelerate that positive change — while politely warning of the drawbacks (which are obvious to us but not to the newcomers).
If you help lead a FOSS project, please join us to discuss how you've been seeing new people join your communities, or use your software in new and interesting ways. We will be running a series of interactive video chats, starting on April 21 at 15:00 UTC and April 28 at 23:00 UTC, in this room. SFC staff and volunteers will discuss these issues with the public. We'll consider how we can adapt FOSS projects to improve pro-AI contributor onboarding and how to better understand how newcomers are using and making software these days. Please subscribe to us on the fediverse as well, to learn about future such chats. SFC has dedicated 20 years already to successfully making FOSS the best it can be. We plan to do the same for the next 20 years, by understanding the needs of billions of new software developers, and harnessing the new tools they are using to improve the world for everyone.
Please email any comments on this entry to info@sfconservancy.org.