The Open Source Paradox

open source oss community culture software ethics
October 10, 2025
5 min read
By Ali Shan

Table of Contents

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The Open Source Paradox

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1. The Dream and the Drift

Open source was supposed to be our collective superpower. A way to share what we build, learn from each other, and move the world forward together.

And for a long time, it worked. The biggest tools and frameworks we use every day — Linux, React, Node, Postgres — were born from people who just cared enough to build something useful for others.

But somewhere along the way, we started losing that spark. What used to be about contribution slowly turned into a competition for visibility. Pull requests became portfolio pieces. GitHub profiles became scoreboards. And the joy of building together turned into pressure to perform.

As a software engineering student, I’ve felt that conflict up close. You want to contribute because you love the idea of open source, but there’s always that voice in your head saying, make it look good on GitHub. That’s not open source. That’s marketing dressed as contribution.

2. When Contribution Becomes Performance

Events like Hacktoberfest started with good intentions, to help more people get involved. But once rewards like shirts and badges came into the picture, people stopped caring about why they were contributing. They only cared about how many pull requests they could make.

The result was a flood of meaningless PRs. Fixing random typos. Adding emojis. Editing words just to get a merge. I saw maintainers drowning under that. In one case, ExpressJS maintainers were getting four spam PRs an hour. Real developers, who work for free, were forced to clean up thousands of pull requests that added no value.

The Apna College GitHub tutorial made this even worse. It told thousands of students to submit their first pull request to ExpressJS just to “learn.” The idea was fine, but the execution hurt one of the biggest frameworks in the world. That wasn’t learning. It was a denial of service on people’s time and energy.

And honestly, it broke something for me. Because open source isn’t a playground for practice. It’s someone’s unpaid work, someone’s weekend project, someone’s effort to make your life easier.

3. The Real Cost of Free

People love to say open source is “free,” but it really isn’t. It costs time, energy, and often mental health. Maintainers handle bugs, review pull requests, answer questions, and keep everything running — all while working regular jobs. And most of them never get paid for it.

It’s what economists call the tragedy of the commons. Everyone uses it, but few give back. We all saw what happens when this neglect goes too far with the Log4j disaster. A tiny team maintaining a library used by the entire internet was left unsupported until something finally broke.

And yet, despite everything, open source still survives because some people care enough to keep showing up. That’s what gives me hope. The community isn’t dead. It’s just tired.

4. Doing It Right

If you’re new, please start small. You don’t need to write code right away. You can fix documentation, update examples, test features, or just answer questions. These things help more than you think.

Set up your own repo to learn Git and pull requests before touching big projects. When you’re ready, look for issues labeled good first issue or help wanted. When you do make a pull request, make sure it solves a real problem, no matter how small. Think of it as joining someone’s story, not just adding a line of code.

Because that’s what open source really is — a long, ongoing story written by people who care.

5. Reclaiming What Made It Beautiful

Open source isn’t broken. It’s just lost under noise, ego, and burnout. But it’s still one of the best things we’ve built as a community.

The fix isn’t technical. It’s cultural. We need empathy instead of ego. Care instead of clout.

To educators, please teach GitHub responsibly. Use sandbox repos, not production projects. To companies, stop taking free labor for granted and start funding the tools you depend on. And to new contributors, remember that a good PR is one that makes life easier for the person maintaining it.

Open source doesn’t need more stars or pull requests. It needs more people who actually care.

Let’s bring that back.