Came across this note from Chad Whitacre, who’s someone very central in the free and open source software movement. He says he’s walking away from not just the work and community but also from software, and going offline.
If you read this and read a lot of the commentary on Hacker News, one version is that it’s a burnout. The other version that I’m beginning to see is that perhaps we mistook the outcome for the purpose. And in a way, AI and large language models accelerated the outcome but killed the purpose.
In this case, the practice.
One way — and I’m not saying it’s the only way — of looking at open source communities is that your contribution, whether it was code or content, was three things at once: proof that you showed up, evidence that you put in effort, and a submission for review by a group of your peers.
And that’s how trust was built, how newcomers were engaged, how shared standards emerged. In a sense, the code was the artefact, and the practice of showing up, being reviewed, and earning trust over time was the point. The community. In other words, if it’s no longer code which is scarce, then what is the point, and what is the artefact? The process of organisation itself?
And in many ways this extends beyond open source. Maybe I’m over-matching patterns, but there’s a version of this that exists and continues to accelerate in philanthropy and social change itself.
For example, I was reading about the new amendment the Ministry of Corporate Affairs made to allow CSR capital to flow to the Social Stock Exchange. And it’s elegant, it’s rigorous, it’s all of those things. But at the end of the day, I wonder if it builds beautiful bridges to nowhere — because there is one version of social change, at least the one that I’ve been drawn towards, that requires a practice of trust between people and institutions. And that’s much harder to measure and validate.
In a way, whether it’s for code or for communities, once we build measurement infrastructure and disclosure frameworks and contribution metrics to make what was otherwise invisible work visible, we’re then left asking what the point was all along. The inefficiencies are what generated the friction. The friction is what generated the change.
Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe a codebase can be alive without a community around it. Maybe a bridge is valuable infrastructure even if no one walks across it.
References
- Chad Whitacre, “I am retiring from tech to live offline”.
- Hacker News discussion.
Originally written for LinkedIn on 30 May 2026. View original →