--- title: The importance of communities around software | daily.dev description: A strong copyleft license alone does not guarantee a project upholds software freedom, the author argues. Community, not license, is what dictates a project's... canonical: https://daily.dev/posts/the-importance-of-communities-around-software-tyug4k6ie twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:site: @dailydotdev og:type: website og:site_name: daily.dev og:title: The importance of communities around software | daily.dev og:description: A strong copyleft license alone does not guarantee a project upholds software freedom, the author argues. Community, not license, is what dictates a project's... og:url: https://daily.dev/posts/the-importance-of-communities-around-software-tyug4k6ie og:image: https://api.daily.dev/og/posts/Tyug4K6ie.png og:image:alt: The importance of communities around software og:image:width: 1200 og:image:height: 630 og:locale: en --- > ## Documentation Index > Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://daily.dev/llms.txt > Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further. # The importance of communities around software **[Hacker News](https://daily.dev/sources/hn)** · 3 min read · 1 upvotes · 0 comments ## Summary A strong copyleft license alone does not guarantee a project upholds software freedom, the author argues. Community, not license, is what dictates a project's values. An AGPL-3.0 project that is dual-licensed commercially and forces a contributor license agreement is cited as an example of something technically free but not community-run. The author urges readers to join or contribute to the communities around free software projects, through coding, documentation, artwork, or outreach, and points to The Starlight Network and Polyphony as examples of communities that develop software together. ## Full article daily.dev links to this article rather than hosting it. Read it at the original source: ## Questions this post answers ### Does having an AGPL license guarantee a project is truly committed to software freedom? No, a license alone is not a guarantee. A project can be AGPL-3.0, dual-licensed under a commercial license, and still force a contributor license agreement on contributors, making it technically free software but not community-run or truly aligned with software freedom values in practice. _Evaluating a dependency's real openness? daily.dev surfaces community discussion around licensing trade-offs like this._ ### What can I do to support a free software project besides writing code? Non-coding contributions matter just as much: community management, documentation, artwork, triage, and outreach are all needed tasks. Joining the community around a project, speaking up against unethical practices, and advocating for those who can't speak up are ways to shape a project's values beyond contributing code. _Developers looking to get involved in open source beyond code can track community discussions on daily.dev._ ## Community take How the wider developer community reacted, aggregated from 2 discussions and 112 comments across hackernews, lobsters (as of 2026-10-30). **TL;DR:** The thread largely sidesteps the post's own argument about community vs. license, instead sprawling into a long, heated debate about AI's role in software development and open source, with scattered skepticism toward the post's framing of 'community' and codes of conduct. **Sentiment:** 10% positive · 25% mixed · 65% skeptical **The case for** - Some argue a community can meaningfully support and sustain a project beyond just its license, citing examples like forks (ffmpeg/libav) as evidence open licenses enable community formation. - A few note that finding the right project can make community contribution rewarding despite earlier bad experiences elsewhere. **The pushback** - Many argue the license, not community sentiment, is what actually guarantees freedom, since anyone can fork and build their own community under an open license. - Some say codes of conduct and curated 'communities' function more like exclusionary clubs than genuine open communities. - Several commenters dispute that community itself has much value, arguing good software attracts users with or without an explicit community. - A large portion of the thread argues AI-assisted/'vibe-coded' contributions are eroding the human element that makes open-source communities meaningful. - Some view dual-licensing and CLAs as pragmatic rather than a betrayal of community values, contradicting the post's framing. - A few dismiss the post's politics/ideology as coloring its argument, calling the piece less about community and more about the author's personal values. **By community** - hackernews (heated): The discussion fractures mostly into an extended, contentious debate over AI's role in software and society, with only a side thread directly and skeptically engaging the post's community-vs-license argument. **Hottest debate:** Whether AI-assisted development is fundamentally corrosive to human-driven software communities or an inevitable, normalized part of the future. **Open questions** - If community doesn't guarantee freedom, what mechanism (beyond license) actually ensures a project stays community-run? - Can genuine open-source communities coexist with widespread AI-assisted contributions, or does AI hollow out what made those communities valuable? - Is a 'community' even necessary for a free software project to succeed, given examples of successful tools with little community around them? **Highlights** > Several points: You need to build a thing first. Community doesn't matter if you don't have cool software. License doesn't matter if you don't have cool software. I'm seeing people forget this principle a lot recently. The best thing you can do to promote free software is to make good free software. I was recently invited to sign a European digital sovereignty petition (which I am not eligible to sign). Know what helps much more with that? Making European digital sovereign systems. Instead of petitioning the government to switch MS Office to LibreOffice someone would have to actually put in the effort to find out why the government doesn't use LibreOffice, and fix that. (It's probably not because it doesn't run on their computers!) You have to use copyleft licenses or else the software quickly becomes unfree, if it's actually worth anything. This doesn't happen to most non-copyleft free software because it's not worth very much, not because it doesn't happen. A community of users doesn't have much value. Any forum or Discord guild or mailing list is secondary to the actual software and it actually being used. Plenty of successful software has no "community" - sudo, for example. Plenty of software with a "community" is not successful. Some software is successful and has a community, like Blender. A community of developers is only valuable if they're doing valuable things. The Fediverse chat group that shared the link to the European digital sovereignty petition - no useful Fediverse software seems to be coming out of the people in that group. It's all about ivory-tower protocols that won't possibly work in the real world, and stuff like that. No actually working software. We also have to stop over-estimating the worth of free software just because it's free. Good free software is good software which is also free software. No software is bad, bad software is also bad. Some random code you wrote and published somewhere on the internet usually isn't very useful, and that's probably why it doesn't have a community. Don't try to create a community first - that won't make the software any better. You have to make good software, that can spread by word of mouth, first and then you can have a community after that. Think about the number of random little programs on the internet, now think how many are installed on your computer - not a very big percentage, but the ones that you do have installed, many people have installed. Those are the useful ones. In most projects the original creators remain the main developers no matter how many other contributors join. Late contributors having a significant effect on a project is the exception, not the rule, and when it happens it's actually an undesirable power inversion since the original creator retains unearned influence - see the PolyMC incident. There is no way to become the chief developer of a project other than having created it. If you think you can rewrite the whole thing and make it better, don't "join the community" - make a fork (which makes you part of the community, but that is not the main goal!). If you're actually doing the majority of the work, offering a dual license is not unethical. We are forced to live in capitalism whether we like it or not, and we should be trying to squeeze money out of capitalist entities - lord knows they're good at squeezing money out of us. To not play that game is to lose by default. This isn't incompatible with being nice to people who are not money-squeezers, if you dual-license. A community fork can legally continue as AGPL-only. (You don't necessarily need a full CLA either, you just need people to agree their code will be in your commercial version. Programmers treat licenses and CLAs like satisfying the borrow checker, but that's not how they actually work.) > — [immibis2 on hackernews · 1 comments](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50295357) > > Does the project have an inclusive code of conduct? If you want a project to be community driven, adding an agreement that empowers its leaders to punish and exclude any community member for any reason, including reasons that have nothing to do with the project itself, is the opposite of that. Codes of conduct result in dictator-driven projects, not community-driven projects. > — [bakugo on hackernews · 3 comments](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50295081) > Seems like you aren't actually disagreeing at all? First you're just disagreeing about the relative importance of "community" vs the license used. This does not seem like an important distinction, blog rhetorical structuring aside, since the value of each is really "it depends" (in the extreme, neither community or license matter if no one ever sees or hears of the code, for instance). Second: > If I publish my code under an open source license... If I keep my code proprietary... That isn't even the distinction that the author is making. They're only talking about communities around open source code. They spell out the dichotomy quite explicitly: > This is why I don't care as much anymore about a project being under a copyleft free software license or a non-copyleft free software license. > — [magicalist on hackernews](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50295652) > I recently got a "WatchPad": a smart watch "back", which you can stick on the back of a non-smart watch and it does HR, SpO2, step, sleep monitoring. I didn't particularly want the ugly app, but it is implemented in GadgetBridge[1], which is on codeberg. That's an Android app, but I wanted a MacOS version. I LLM-reverse engineered the API based on the GadgetBridge work and now have a MacOS version, specific for my device. As part of that I worked out how to do temperature monitoring (which GadgetBridge doesn't support). Normally I'd contribute that back, but codeberg has been very explicit on their policy of no-LLM work, so I guess I won't do that. So much for community. [1] https://codeberg.org/Freeyourgadget/Gadgetbridge > — [nl on hackernews](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50296315) > The longer I think about the impact of AI on software development, the more I see parallels between "pets" and "cattle" types of software projects. Or more aptly, fine china and disposable styrofoam plates. LLM-based development allows large-scale production of essentially disposable software. Which is fine for many business cases - software is a cost for them. Even with software as products, it makes sense to optimize production costs. But open-source software is far more about the process than the product. And therefore longevity of resulting software can be expected to be far greater. Foundations of our software stack - libraries, source control operating systems, compilers, databases and numerous other pieces require people capable and willing to do a long-term care of the software - hence, the community that need to last decades. Linux and PostgreSQL is 35 years old, git is 21, OpenSSL 28. I believe human-only software development will remain for the foreseeable future, despite the growth of LLM-based ones, just like mass-produced grocery bread didn't displace the artisanal bakeries. > — [d\_silin on hackernews · 1 comments](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50295771) **Source threads** - [hackernews](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50294507) · 94 points · 112 comments - [lobsters](https://lobste.rs/s/o8xo9z/importance_communities_around_software) · 21 points · 0 comments ## Similar posts on daily.dev - [Programming used to be free](https://daily.dev/posts/programming-used-to-be-free-ceydkqepr) · Lobsters · 53 upvotes · 16 comments - [Is legal the same as legitimate: AI reimplementation and the erosion of copyleft](https://daily.dev/posts/is-legal-the-same-as-legitimate-ai-reimplementation-and-the-erosion-of-copyleft-as05fq4nh) · Hacker News · 0 upvotes · 0 comments - [Funding open-source software without compromising it](https://daily.dev/posts/funding-open-source-software-without-compromising-it-afpdgtgvu) · Lobsters · 0 upvotes · 0 comments --- Tags: [#open-source](https://daily.dev/tags/open-source), [#licensing](https://daily.dev/tags/licensing) [View this post on daily.dev](https://daily.dev/posts/the-importance-of-communities-around-software-tyug4k6ie) ```json {"@context":"https://schema.org","@graph":[{"@type":"Organization","@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization","name":"daily.dev","url":"https://daily.dev","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://daily.dev/apple-touch-icon.png","width":180,"height":180},"sameAs":["https://twitter.com/dailydotdev","https://github.com/dailydotdev","https://www.linkedin.com/company/daily-dev-ltd"]},{"@type":"WebSite","@id":"https://daily.dev/#website","url":"https://daily.dev","name":"daily.dev","publisher":{"@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization"},"potentialAction":{"@type":"SearchAction","target":{"@type":"EntryPoint","urlTemplate":"https://daily.dev/search?q={search_term_string}"},"query-input":"required name=search_term_string"}}]} {"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"TechArticle","headline":"The importance of communities around software","url":"https://daily.dev/posts/the-importance-of-communities-around-software-tyug4k6ie","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://daily.dev/posts/the-importance-of-communities-around-software-tyug4k6ie"},"datePublished":"2026-10-29T21:30:01.078Z","dateModified":"2026-10-30T01:01:22.722Z","description":"A strong copyleft license alone does not guarantee a project upholds software freedom, the author argues. 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