4 ms·

Enshittification is built into the system. All good things must become shit over time. All commercial things are subject to these pressures. Open source proj

Enshittification is built into the system. All good things must become shit over time. All commercial things are subject to these pressures. Open source projects are not. We need to decomercialize everything that we can.

linguae 3y ago
It depends on the open source project. Not all open source projects are community-driven or are controlled by benevolent dictators; there are some open source projects that are developed by companies selling products and services using those projects (e.g., Red Hat, various database companies before they started switching to non-FOSS source-available licenses), and there are open source projects that are supported by academic institutions and public-sector laboratories. The open source world is not immune to economic pressures. Even the hobbyist donating code still needs to make a living. Thus it’s possible for some open source projects to still undergo “enshittification” if economic pressures influence the maintainers of these projects accordingly.
nebula8804 3y ago
A lot of open source sucks. Think about it. The model is a mirror of how government works. Either you only only solve specific bullet points instead of a holistic solution(many open source apps being more convoluted to use vs closed source competitors) or you suffer from the "too many cooks" problem and you end up with a mess of a project (eg. Desktop Linux and all its problems)
- yummypaint 3y ago
  I don't think it's fair refer to "desktop linux" as a monolith. It's really lots of independent developers and teams offering a broad diversity of solutions to common compute problems. Having a pool of possible solutions means that some will innevitably be worse for a given use case, but this is a strength overall. The other side of the coin is that commercial software also sucks in general, but users of commercial software often have no choice in the matter and are being held hostage by vendor lock-in.

linguae 3y ago

It depends on the open source project. Not all open source projects are community-driven or are controlled by benevolent dictators; there are some open source projects that are developed by companies selling products and services using those projects (e.g., Red Hat, various database companies before they started switching to non-FOSS source-available licenses), and there are open source projects that are supported by academic institutions and public-sector laboratories. The open source world is not immune to economic pressures. Even the hobbyist donating code still needs to make a living. Thus it’s possible for some open source projects to still undergo “enshittification” if economic pressures influence the maintainers of these projects accordingly.

nebula8804 3y ago

A lot of open source sucks. Think about it. The model is a mirror of how government works. Either you only only solve specific bullet points instead of a holistic solution(many open source apps being more convoluted to use vs closed source competitors) or you suffer from the "too many cooks" problem and you end up with a mess of a project (eg. Desktop Linux and all its problems)

yummypaint 3y ago
I don't think it's fair refer to "desktop linux" as a monolith. It's really lots of independent developers and teams offering a broad diversity of solutions to common compute problems. Having a pool of possible solutions means that some will innevitably be worse for a given use case, but this is a strength overall. The other side of the coin is that commercial software also sucks in general, but users of commercial software often have no choice in the matter and are being held hostage by vendor lock-in.