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Given the recent uproar about AI usage in rsync a PSA: maintainers owe you nothing (mikemcquaid.com)
submitted 2 months ago by onlinepersona@programming.dev to c/opensource@programming.dev
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For those outside the loop: rsync starting using AI agents to handle the influx of AI security reports to improve the test suite and fix bugs. It introduced a few CVEs and people who never contributed in any way started firing shots at the maintainer.

rsync maintainer's response to the people getting pissy about his usage of AI: medium and the related post on programming.dev

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[-] refalo@programming.dev 6 points 2 months ago

Protest forks never survive though. They always start overly ambitious and then realize how much of a full-time job it really is, and eventually give up.

[-] eleijeep@piefed.social 6 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

The ones that survive are the ones that you forget are forks

LibreOffice (from OpenOffice)
Jenkins (from Hudson)
VeraCrypt (from TrueCrypt)
ValKey (from Redis)
MariaDB (from MySQL)
LibreWolf, Waterfox et al. (from Firefox)
Angie (from nginx)
CoMaps (from Organic Maps)

The list goes on and on. Just about every Linux distribution is derived from one of the three or four earliest ones.

[-] refalo@programming.dev 0 points 2 months ago

I don't consider those purely protest forks in the same sense as say, the GIMP fork called Glimpse.

this post was submitted on 05 Jun 2026
69 points (87.9% liked)

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