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

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.”

Congrats guys! We did it!

Thanks for joining in!

Seriously, enough was going on with the project that the AI was just the final nail (or the deepest nail) in the coffin. What’s important is that we denounce AI where we see it, as this (and not “usage”) is the only non-violent way we have to try and lead a change in how AI is developed and deployed in the first place. The problem is not simply “someone can use AI in their spare time”, it’s what even has to happen as a prerequisite for that to even be a thing in the first place (code theft, mass license violation, environmental destruction, RAM shortages, erosion of civil and digital rights, exemptions for big corpo, you name it).

We should all feel ashamed that an open source project was shuttered because of how our community acted.

Open Source means the source is open, not that you can do whatever ass-unethical thing you want. That weird impression of the world is something that techbros, cryptobros and liberals are trying to push. Don’t be fooled. We defended ourselves, and we managed a tie.

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.

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.

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.

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.

How they were contributing is irrelevant

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).

We should all feel ashamed that an open source project was shuttered because of how our community acted.

I would draw the focus much more narrowly: “We should all feel ashamed that an open source project was shuttered because 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.

So, completely uneducated about the real issues that led to this, you decided this was a good opportunity for your pro AI soap box.

Yeah, there’s definitely a reason we can’t have reasonable conversations around AI.

The risks of auto-updating now include “devs losing their shit” which has become increasingly common.

On my server I have Calibre Web Automated, Komga, and Kavita setup. I started with CWA for epubs and it’s been pretty great especially for syncing metadata that, with the recent update, has gotten better. The downside I’ve had is with comics. It supports them but there’s currently no support for writing metadata for .cbr or .cbz so trying to sync or update metadata errors out. Sometimes it saves it, but a lot of the time it errors out for me. Which is why I spun up Komga and Kavita. They’re both good for comics, manga, and books. Plus the UI on both is nice. However, they both don’t sync metadata as well as CWA. I think there’s another container you can create to write metadata for Komga and Kavita, but I had no luck with it. Eventually I’ll decide on just one, but so far, I’m undecided on which one I like the most.

Bad Bot. None of these terms are in this thread.

I just switched to Komga, the only thing I’m missing is the easy way to search for metadata, but I don’t mind that part. Komga works perfectly fine for normal books in my short testing.

The handling of books is a bit weird, because for single books it creates a “Series” with only one entry.

I don’t directly sync to my Kobo reader, but instead use KOReader and access Komga via OPDS. The progress sync from KOReader to Komga works too (just don’t use special characters in your password)