• Open collaboration runs on trust. • For a long time, that trust was protected by a natural, if imperfect filter: friction. • If you were on Usenet in 1993, you’ll remember that every September a flood of new university students would arrive online, unfamiliar with the norms, and the community would patiently onboard them. • Then mainstream dial-up ISPs became popular and a continuous influx of new users came online. • It became the September that never ended. • Today, open source is experiencing its own Eternal September.
Article Summaries:
- Open‑source projects are experiencing an “Eternal September” of contribution volume, driven by lower friction from pull‑request workflows and generative‑AI tools that can produce code, issues, or security reports in seconds. While this accessibility has broadened participation, it also floods maintainers with low‑quality or “AI slop” submissions that overwhelm review capacity. The article notes that maintainers have long dealt with noisy inputs-Linux’s web‑of‑trust, Mozilla’s triage systems, and automated scanners-but the current scale strains trust and workload. The piece calls for new approaches to balance ease of entry with sustainable review processes.
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