A handful of Go libraries on GitHub. MIT licensed, anyone can use them for anything, that was always the deal.
But the deal isn’t about the license. It’s about the loop.
Someone uses your thing, hits an edge case, opens an issue. Sometimes they send a fix. You review it, learn how people actually use what you built, catch a pattern you missed. That back and forth is the whole point. Code just sits there without it.
Open source isn’t about payment. It’s about participation. Someone reads the approach, disagrees, pushes back, both sides get sharper.
The loop’s gotten quieter though. And it’s not just that code got ingested. It’s that the path to the loop disappeared. Someone has a problem, asks an AI, gets a solution that looks a lot like how a library handles it. They never find the repo. Never read the source. Never hit the edge case themselves because they got the answer pre-digested. The person who would’ve opened that issue doesn’t even know the library exists.
The code is always the least interesting part. The decisions behind it, the approaches you tried before landing on this one, the debugging session that reshaped the API. That’s craft. You can copy the output and absorb none of it.
I’m fine with it – meant the license when I chose it. But the loop is what makes it worth doing. That’s the part going quiet.