The moderators of r/opensource posted new submission rules on Saturday evening, and the first sentence leaves little room: “If your project uses AI, is made by AI, or is intended for AI, it’s not welcome on r/opensource. AI, as it exists today, is incongruent to this Open Source community.” The Verge collected the reaction on Sunday.
The comments have been in revolt since. There is already a rival subreddit, r/trueopensource. Moderator Wolvereness waded in to explain that there is nuance and room for selective enforcement, for instance around “software that incidentally has accessibility features that use AI,” such as automatic captioning. That has not calmed the criticism. Many consider the rule too broad, aimed at the wrong thing, or simply vague.
The strongest counterargument is practical: the Linux kernel now contains AI-generated code. Anyone using it falls under the ban as written.
The AI rule is the first of three hurdles
Two further rules have drawn less attention and probably affect more people. Submitted projects must be at least a year old, actively maintained, and have multiple contributors. That rules out the solo developer with a new project, which is to say the person looking for help. The moderators add: “we can no longer field requests asking for maintainers or people to contribute.”
Then the part that is hard to defend: “If you don’t speak English, you need to find a different community. We cannot distinguish between AI-written and AI-translated. Since you don’t speak English, you can’t even verify yourself if it translated correctly.” The justification for excluding non-English speakers is, in other words, AI detection.
Where detection fails, the circle gets smaller
This is not an argument about AI. It is an argument about what you do when you can no longer establish where something came from.
The moderators have a real problem. A subreddit taking project submissions every day cannot tell what a human wrote and what a model wrote, and the flood of freshly generated repositories is not imaginary. But the answer they chose is a filter that sorts by age, team size and native language. It catches the generated slop, and alongside it everyone who starts alone or whose English came out of a translator.
Open source never defined itself by who typed the code, only by the right to read and change it. A rule that starts with authorship checks something the licence never cared about. That a counter-subreddit formed within hours is no surprise, then. It is the shortest form of dissent Reddit offers.