True. It should however be noted that the most active maintainer of AnkiDroid will be joining the new entity:
> We’re currently talking to David Allison, a long-time core contributor to AnkiDroid, about working together on exactly these questions. His experience with AnkiDroid’s collaborative development is invaluable, and we’re grateful he’s willing to help us get this right. We’re incredibly excited to have him join us full-time to help propel Anki into the future.
Yeah, and while they say AnkiDroid is going to be maintained by the original creator separate from AnkiHub, we won't be privy to any employment contract language that makes any work done by the employee as being property of AnkiHub. Which would be an issue.
Why would that be an issue?
Because it would mean any contribution by AnkiDroid's owner to AnkiDroid would be considered property of his new employer, AnkiHub.
If it's still open source it doesn't matter who owns the copyright.
Not strictly true afaik? If you own the copyright to the entire codebase you can relicense at will to a different license. (that's what CLAs enable among other things)
Not sure whether you'd still be entitled to the source code under the previous license then.. can a copyright owner revoke a previously issued license to the code? Haven't heard of it, but wouldn't surprise me if it's legal.
Sure, you can change the license, but the old license still applies to the code as it was before you changed it. Assuming you're using a legit open source license the first time around, nothing changes regarding how you can make use of the old code; all they can do is make it harder to find (close the repo) or harder to make use of (squashing/flattening the commits to make it impossible to get the correct historical version), both of which are trivially bypassed by using a third party fork or source release.
I am aware, but I don't think that's what OP was talking about.
You can't revoke previously issued licenses (unless the license allows it, which it doesn't in this case).
A contributor's license agreement would overrule the terms of the employment contract, assuming they set one up properly.
anki has so much potential and has such a big and unique audience, it is incomprehensible to me how it has managed to be so neglected.
and then now why, of all times, when a solo developer is never more productive, would the lead maintainer cede ownership? the antidote for programming burnout has just been invented, just take it haha
My experience using AI is that it wildly increases burnout, not decreases it.
Writing code is fun. Solving interesting problems is fun.
Debugging deep problems is fun.
Debugging slop code is a painful suffering experience, having to constantly double check that the AI agent didn't just change the unit tests to "return true" and lie to you is tiring, and the feeling that you can't significantly improve the tool burns me out hard.
That last one can't be overstated. When I find a weird behavior that looks like a bug in the linux kernel or rustc or such, I find it exhilarating to read code and understand what the bug is, how it got there, and to feel like I can fix it and never see it again.
When claude code gives me a "wrong" output for my prompt, I don't feel like there's any possible way I can go and find what part of the Opus 4.5 model resulted in it not being able to give better output.
I feel helpless to debug what went wrong when claude code spirals into the deep end.
I can add more initial context, add skills, but those are tiny heuristic tweaks around the giant mass of incomprehensible weights and biases that no human understands.
The antidote for programming burnout is not to replace all the fun parts of programming with painful probabilistic suffering.
I've been using Anki for a few years and have never experienced it as neglected. There are regular updates and a big community contributing knowledge, add-ins, etc.