According to the official Discord, "ACX has made the decision to close Booklore and step away." Some contributors are working together on an unnamed replacement project.
For those not in the loop, Booklore was an app for selfhosting book libraries. It had a nice UI. It was able to store metadata separately from the download files, so you could have an organized library without duplication. In recent weeks, there have been conflicts about AI code, licensing, and general Discord nastiness.
RIP
Edit: The discord, website and github are all gone. I found a copy of the announcement:
Announcement
๐ข A note on where things stand
ACX has made the decision to close BookLore and step away. He has a partner, a new chapter of his life ahead of him, and honestly - building something that reached 10k stars and thousands of daily users is something to be proud of. We wish him well.
That said - this community, and this project, is bigger than any one person. That's the whole point of open source.
So here's what's happening next:
A group of the original contributors - the people who built a lot of what you've been using - are continuing the work under a new name. [PROJECT NAME TBD] is that continuation. Same mission. Better foundation. Governed the way an open source project should be: transparently, collaboratively, and with the community at the center.
We're not starting from zero. We're starting from everything this community has already built together.
If you want to be part of what comes next, come join us: ๐ https://discord.gg/FwqHeFWk
More details - name, repo, roadmap - coming very shortly. Thank you for your patience, and thank you for giving a damn about this project. That's exactly why it's worth continuing.
Congrats guys! We did it!
We took a project that someone made for free, shared it to the internet for others to enjoy, worked on in his spare time, and killed it because of his choice in tools. Sure he was probably overwhelmed with issues counting up and demands from his users on his project that he made for free, but he should have developed his application in the way we demanded. It's truly for the greater good that we have one less free open source project out there, and one less developer working on his passion project.
Seriously. I loathe AI's encroachment into everything. Copilot and OpenAI are being absolute assholes. However, the people who scream against it on message boards and and tell fellow engineers that they're evil for using it are honestly approaching about the same level of annoyance to me. Should AI be everywhere? Absolutely not. Does it have actual uses? Absolutely it does. Is AI killing software engineering? Debatable. What isn't debatable is that us, people, killed this project. We can debate about the ethics of AI for ages. That's not the point of this comment though.
Right now, an open source project has closed, and some guy who made this for free and shared it with us will probably never develop in the open source community again, AI or not. Open source should mean that anyone can write anything for fun or seriously, and we all have the choice to use it or not. It doesn't matter if it's silly or useful or nonsense or horrible, open source means open. Instead we shut down/closed out someone who was contributing. How they were contributing is irrelevant, what is relevant is that they probably never will again. Open means open, open to anyone and everyone. We should all feel ashamed that an open source project was shuttered because of how our community acted.
I don't blame the greater community for this one. Booklore was well-received. I have nothing but good wishes for all those involved. Much of the fighting about code quality and AI was among actual contributors.