With AI, I have no idea what Open Source is going to look like 5 years from now.
I'm sure folks like
@mitchellh,
@badlogicgames or
@zeeg will keep on making interesting stuff.
But for the average contributor, the barriers to entry are probably gonna look very different.
Anyone with a bit of experience, taste and time can whip out something in a weekend. The bar used to be much higher. Documentation alone would make the difference between a popular library and a dead one with 3 stars on GitHub.
And how much harder is it going to be to create a viable business with Open Source. You can monetize infrastructure or enterprise support, but is it that valuable once AI can take care of that too?