Discourse is Not Going Closed Source

Cal.com have announced they’re closing their codebase and will no longer be an open-source product. Their reasoning is that AI has made open source too dangerous for SaaS companies. Code gets scanned and exploited by AI at near-zero cost, and transparency is now becoming exposure.


This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://blog.discourse.org/2026/04/discourse-is-not-going-closed-source
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thank you sam. i appreciate you addressing this head on like this.
i have been following the recent related ai news (as best i can keep up) and this question has certainly been in the back of my mind. keep up the great work. :discourse:

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Lots of respect here, this was something I was concerned about in the back of my mind for a while now with Discourse. Thank you guys for being on the right side of this and continuing to not enshittify the core product. I can’t imagine we’ll get AI regulation for a while longer for many reasons but things are very grim right now.

I hope you all know how much everybody appreciates not self-hosting the product and still being begged to cough up money to unlock basic features (like many “open source” products do). :meow_heart:

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Suddenly closing your source doesn’t magically fix all existing security issues in your code which have not been identified yet. But it sure will prevent the community from helping to fix it.

Besides that, it is also a dick move to everybody who helped grow your product. Why would I now, or ever do anything with/for cal.com after this action. Why would I do anything for their hobbyist “fork” cal.dyi . They just threw away all the trust they created.