Just to nit pick (though maybe not) is there a social contract? That usually implies in exchange for X, you get Y.
If the thing is provided as FOSS, what does the dev get, contract wise?
Isn't that how we end up with devs walking away entirely due to "I downloaded your project, you owe me xyz, you fuck"? I've seen that happen more than once and it's a real factor in projects being abandoned, even before slopcode.
Speaking for myself only: when I share something, it's usually something I made for myself that I think others might enjoy or find useful.
As the dev, I'm happy to look at suggestions or reports, with no guarantee that your idea will be implemented. If it is, I credit it and you.
I also refuse PRs, because if I am developing for me and sharing, then I'm not developing a product for sale to spec or running a democracy. I don't know you, you don't know me and you likely don't know what the long term road map or invariant constraints are, so I'd rather just not. I realise that's not a commonly held position but it's in the same "limited time" category.
I'm happy for you to fork it, ask questions and spin up your own tho - that's why I like AGPL-3.
Between all that, I've been able to avoid the excesses of both sides but YMMV.
Maybe but right now, according to the Steam hardware survey, the most commonly owned VRAM tier is 8GB - sitting at around 27% of surveyed systems, with 16GB closing the gap fast.
Even with MoE and llama.cpp tricks, you're not running frontier anything at decent context length without significant fiddling on that - it's possible on 8GB but you're operating with almost no headroom, 16GB might let you scrape by with a Q4 quant MoE.
The very best local coding models (arguably the Qwen3-Coder-30B-A3B MoE or Qwen 3.6-27B) need 16-17GB at Q4 quantisation, and building a system from scratch to run one is probably a $3.5K proposition. With the cost of living crisis hitting everywhere, that means the table ante gear is beyond the reach of many. Even a decent GPU is north of $1K in many local markets.
I adore small LLMs, and know a lot of tricks to leverage them, but 14B is the bare minimum for what I would start to consider competent.
We're boned until 2030ish, when gear gets cheaper (allegedly).
Part of me thinks there's a dark conspiracy at play here. Give people affordable access to frontier LLMs, make self hosting hardware cost prohibitive, then jack up subscription prices.
I think there's a way out of that mess, but it needs people to stop chasing "bigger, better" and start chasing "actually, how can I use what I have to do X instead of needing bigger and better?" but that needs talented devs and a mind shift.
ICBW and YMMV.