According to the official Discord, “ACX has made the decision to close Booklore and step away.” Some contributors are working together on an unnamed replacement project.
For those not in the loop, Booklore was an app for selfhosting book libraries. It had a nice UI. It was able to store metadata separately from the download files, so you could have an organized library without duplication. In recent weeks, there have been conflicts about AI code, licensing, and general Discord nastiness.
RIP
Edit: The discord, website and github are all gone. I found a copy of the announcement:
Announcement
📢 A note on where things stand
ACX has made the decision to close BookLore and step away. He has a partner, a new chapter of his life ahead of him, and honestly - building something that reached 10k stars and thousands of daily users is something to be proud of. We wish him well.
That said - this community, and this project, is bigger than any one person. That’s the whole point of open source.
So here’s what’s happening next:
A group of the original contributors - the people who built a lot of what you’ve been using - are continuing the work under a new name. [PROJECT NAME TBD] is that continuation. Same mission. Better foundation. Governed the way an open source project should be: transparently, collaboratively, and with the community at the center.
We’re not starting from zero. We’re starting from everything this community has already built together.
If you want to be part of what comes next, come join us: 👉 https://discord.gg/FwqHeFWk
More details - name, repo, roadmap - coming very shortly. Thank you for your patience, and thank you for giving a damn about this project. That’s exactly why it’s worth continuing.
Congrats guys! We did it!
We took a project that someone made for free, shared it to the internet for others to enjoy, worked on in his spare time, and killed it because of his choice in tools. Sure he was probably overwhelmed with issues counting up and demands from his users on his project that he made for free, but he should have developed his application in the way we demanded. It’s truly for the greater good that we have one less free open source project out there, and one less developer working on his passion project.
Seriously. I loathe AI’s encroachment into everything. Copilot and OpenAI are being absolute assholes. However, the people who scream against it on message boards and and tell fellow engineers that they’re evil for using it are honestly approaching about the same level of annoyance to me. Should AI be everywhere? Absolutely not. Does it have actual uses? Absolutely it does. Is AI killing software engineering? Debatable. What isn’t debatable is that us, people, killed this project. We can debate about the ethics of AI for ages. That’s not the point of this comment though.
Right now, an open source project has closed, and some guy who made this for free and shared it with us will probably never develop in the open source community again, AI or not. Open source should mean that anyone can write anything for fun or seriously, and we all have the choice to use it or not. It doesn’t matter if it’s silly or useful or nonsense or horrible, open source means open. Instead we shut down/closed out someone who was contributing. How they were contributing is irrelevant, what is relevant is that they probably never will again. Open means open, open to anyone and everyone. We should all feel ashamed that an open source project was shuttered because of how our community acted.
As far as I followed this whole ordeal, his use of ai was maybe 20% of what went wrong with this project. Open contempt for FOSS principles and his contributors, a unilateral (and probably illegal) change in license, Discord censorship, API gatekeeping and disingenuous monetization, along with a general dishonest communicationwere probably more of a nail in this coffin then the use of ai code assistance
I’m unaware of these, but I’ll take you at your word. I still say even if the guy is an asshole, we still lost someone who was contributing. If he is picking up his toys and going home, we still lost a developer. I wasn’t there for those issues so I don’t know how they were handled.
I’ll compare it to Lemmy. Lemmy devs are (sorry guys) I’ll say… Disagreeable. They are headstrong and definitely have their own opinions which I have different opinions are about. I don’t think we would be friends. However, look at what they built, and the communities we’ve built thanks to their work. They started all of this, and now we have mbin and piefed and others thanks to what they started, even if don’t like how they handle things. We should always remember that the people contribute, and that’s more than the vast majority of us.
(Not directed only at you commenter, but everyone else reading this to share my point of view)
You may need to go catch up on this. The “dev” in this case caused more issues than they solved.
One can’t be missed if one didn’t contribute to anything in the first place.
This is a bad take. AI is an attack on open source, and so no, open source communities shouldn’t be welcoming of that kind of attack. It’s a bit like the Paradox of Tolerance… you cannot tolerate intolerance, or else your whole community falls apart.
The other way I tend to think of it is ad volunteering st your local library. You can stop whenever you want, you don’t owe anyone more of your time. But what you can’t do is start showing up and shredding books during your shift. Especially for a project dedicated to managing books, using AI is a whole and entire betrayal, and isn’t something that can be brushed away with “AI is just a tool.”
Total non sequitur
you were right btw
I’ve not heard of Booklore or the critiques against it until seeing this post, but I don’t think this take is correct, in parts. And I think much of the confusion has to do with what “open source” means to you, versus that term as a formal definition (ie FOSS), versus the culture that surrounds it. In so many ways, it mirrors the term “free speech” and Popehat (Ken White) has written about how to faithfully separate the different meanings of that term.
Mirroring the same terms from that post, and in the identical spirit of pedantry in the pursuit of tractable discussion, I posit that there are 1) open source rights, 2) open source values, and 3) community decency. The first concerns those legal rights conferred from an open-source (eg ACSL) or Free And Open Source (FOSS, eg MIT or GPL) license. The details of the license and the conferred rights are the proper domain of lawyers, but the choice of which license to release with is the province of contributing developers.
The second concerns “norms” that projects adhere to, such as not contributing non-owned code (eg written on employer time and without authorization to release) or when projects self-organize a process for making community-driven changes but with a supervising BDFL (eg Python and its PEPs). These are not easy or practical to enforce, but represent a good-faith action that keeps the community or project together. These are almost always a balancing-act of competing interests, but in practice work – until they don’t.
Finally, the third is about how the user-base and contributor-base respect (or not) the project and its contributors. Should contributors be considered the end-all-be-all arbiters for the direction of the project? How much weight should a developer code-of-conduct carry? Can one developer be jettisoned to keep nine other developers onboard? This is more about social interactions than about software (ie “political”) but it cannot be fully divorced from any software made by humans. So long as humans are writing software, there will always be questions about how it is done.
So laying that foundation, I address your points.
This definition of open-source is mixing up open-source rights (“we al have the choice to use it or not” and “anyone can write anything”) with open-source values (“for fun or seriously” and “doesn’t matter if it’s silly or useful”). The statement of “open source means open” does not actually convey anything. The final sentence is an argument in the name of community decency.
To be abundantly clear, I agree that harassing someone to the point that they get up and quit, that’s a bad thing. People should not do that. But a candid discussion recognizes that there has been zero impact to open source rights, since the very possibility that “Some contributors are working together on an unnamed replacement project” means that the project can be restarted. More clearly, open-source rights confer an irrevocable license. Even if the original author exits via stage-left, any one of us can pick up the mic and carry on. That is an open-source right, and also an open-source value: people can fork whenever they want.
This is in the realm of community decency because other people would disagree. Plagiarism would be something that violates both the values/norms of open-source and also community decency. AI/LLMs can and do plagiarize. LLMs also produce slop (ie nonfunctioning code), and that’s also verbotten in most projects by norm (PRs would be rejected) or by community decency (PRs would be laughed out).
I would draw the focus much more narrowly: “We should all feel ashamed
that an open source project was shutteredbecause of how our community acted”. Open-source rights and open-source values will persevere beyond us all, but how a community in the here-and-now governs itself is of immediate concern. There are hard questions, just like all community decency questions, but apart from Booklore happening to be open-source, this is not specific at all to FOSS projects.To that end, I close with the following: build the communities you want to see. No amount of people-pleasing will unify all, so do what you can to bring together a coalition of like-minded people. Find allies that will bat for you, and that you would bat for. Reject those who will not extend to you the same courtesy. Software devs find for themselves new communities all the time through that wonderful Internet thing, but they are not without agency to change the course of history, simply by carefully choosing whom they will invest in a community with. Never apologize for having high standards. Go forth and find your place in this world.
There are other problems like reimplemented features after dismissing the PR, threatening to change the licence without contribution approval, and not being able to disassociate criticism of the platform as criticism of him.
The Reddit post about it a few days ago goes into it a lot more.