Ask HN: What's with the Gatekeeping in Open Source?

• plandex

  16 9,497 9.8 Go

  AI driven development in your terminal. Designed for large, real-world tasks.

  

Today I tried to post my open source project on the /r/opensource subreddit. It's an AGPL 3.0-licensed, terminal-based AI coding tool that defaults to OpenAI, but can also be used with other models, including open source models.

The subreddit's rules in the sidebar state that a project must be open source under the definition on Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_source) and also that limited and responsible self-promotion is ok.

My post was automatically blocked, seemingly by the mere mention of "OpenAI". The auto-message stated that "ChatGPT wrappers" were not allowed on the subreddit.

I messaged the mods to tell them about the mistake, since my project plainly was not a "ChatGPT wrapper". One of them replied saying only "Working as intended" and that because my project uses OpenAI models by default, that it isn't welcome in the subreddit.

I asked why projects using OpenAI in particular are penalized (despite this being mentioned nowhere in the rules on the sidebar), considering that there are many posts for projects interfacing with MacOS, Windows, AWS, GitHub, and countless other closed source technologies. I received no answer to this question. I was only told that any project "advertising" OpenAI was "against the spirit of FOSS" and therefore did not belong on the subreddit. The mod also continued derisively referring to my project as a "ChatGPT wrapper" and "OpenAI plugin" despite my earlier explanation. I was also called "egocentric" for wanting to share my project.

It made me sad that a subreddit with over 200k members that seems to have a lot of cool discussions going on is being moderated like this. What's with all the gatekeeping? Why are people so interested in excluding the "wrong" type of open source projects? As far as I'm concerned, if you have an open source license and people can run your code, then your project is open source.

Am I right to be miffed by this or does the moderator have a point? Have you experienced this kind of thing with your own projects? How have you dealt with it?

This is my project, by the way: https://github.com/plandex-ai/plandex

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