30 Billion+ Devices. Their Maintainers Split 3 Ways on AI.
The curl maintainer said AI was drowning open source in slop. Nine weeks later, he said the opposite. Open source governance split three ways in one quarter.
A Thursday evening in Sweden. An inbox with no bottom.
Daniel Stenberg sits at his desk and opens another report. The project is curl. The year is 2026. He has been the primary maintainer since 1998, and the code he wrote as a student now runs in over 10 billion installations. Phones. Cars. Consoles. The payment terminal at the bakery down the street.
Seven weeks ago, in Brussels, he stood in the Janson auditorium at FOSDEM and told an audience that AI was flooding open source with slop reports. He meant it. He had the screenshots.
But now... The last twelve reports are real. The next one is real. The one after that is real. He clicks through. Specific line numbers. Working reproducers. Root causes that hold up under scrutiny. Every one of them was generated with the help of a language model. Every one of them arrives faster than he can read the previous one.
I have never seen governance fracture across this many projects in a single quarter.
The bug reports multiplied...
The forks multiplied...
The partnership deals multiplied...
The bot PRs multiplied...
And the maintainers did not.