Obviously we all want to avoid enshittified (aggressively monetized) software or at least get our money’s worth. I’m looking at self-hosting software right now and one I’m looking has a pricing page but only for cloud (no other paywalled features) and is open source. I tried looking up future plans and didn’t find much, so it doesn’t seem like it will enshittify. (not related) I had thought about switching to Omnivore for a long time but then they merged with ElevenLabs and the rest is history.
Just use open source software?
Just because it’s open source and anyone could theoretically fork it doesn’t mean it can’t be enshitified.
It absolutely does… Can you elaborate on a situation in which FOSS gets enshittified?
The Simple Mobile Tools collection of Android apps. Forks have been made and are maintained fortunately, but the original autor sold the apps to some company that just adds ads and trackers to the apps to make more money out of it.
Android, Chromium.
The problem is that:
And so long as a fork is unlikely, Google can do shitfuckery quite similar to proprietary projects.
Small teams are unable to take web browsers far in another direction as browsers have recklessly grown to one of the largest and most complicated software. Browsers do not follow the “do one thing well” philosophy, to the extreme.
Most functional parts of a browser (text reader, video player) are thankfully resistant to enshitification. That is if they are free (libre), permitting a fork.
Ok, but what’s stopping them other than a lack of desire?
FOSS programs can always be forked and developed independently of the original authors. That’s the “freedom” that makes them FOSS in the first place. I have no desire to make my own fork of Android and its tooling, but if someone out there really wanted to do so, I don’t see what is stopping them. (Other than things like locked down smart phone bootloaders, but that’s got nothing to do with the FOSS part of this discussion.)
I’m kind of skeptical of this idea. FOSS has almost always been able to succeed in the long term despite having a small fraction of the development budget of proprietary software, often due to the passion of weekend devs essentially donating their time to the cause. Whether it’s Linux, Blender, Gitlab, Godot, Krita, etc., I can’t think of a single FOSS project that has funding anywhere near the same level as their corporate rivals.
What you’re saying is right about the possibility, but when you’re assessing some software for yourself, you have to consider things in the bigger perspective.
Some protects are very complex and require multiple teams of developers to maintain. That’s different than a small project that one person can maintain and curate external contributions.
So something like Chromium or Flutter isn’t the type of software that a community will self organize and maintain, they need some sort of organization behind them. This organization will probably need some sort of funding, ex: donations. Otherwise the projects will either fall into chaos and die or they’ll look for other ways to support themselves (ex: Qt with their commercial license and paywalled features).
In practice everything needs resources and without these resources any project simply dies.
My two examples are of OS SaaS that got their plug pulled before they got to that stage. See skiff.com and omnivore.
I’m not familiar with either of those projects or what you mean by “that stage”, but why can’t you and the community around them just fork them and continue development in a way that you prefer? What’s stopping you?
There are various obstacles to “just forking” a project; it requires times to understand the frameworks / libraries used in the project, understand the code and its different parts and last but not least, have a interest to invest that time and energy (most often, that time could be spent developing your own solution that would fit your usecase better).
As for the stage I was referring to, both the theories of enshittification and rot-economy see software and services going through stages to attract new users, before going in for the profit maximizing.
Red Hat and Ubuntu are two that leap to mind.
What’s wrong with Ubuntu and RH? Is it because of the snaps / source code debacle? Both of those had solid business cases to them and while I dislike the outcome, I do understand why they made that choice and most importantly - I still appriciate what each company does for FOSS.
They took all the momentum from the community and put it behind a paywall. It used to be that you could use the whole thing for free and only needed to pay for support, but now you need to pay for subscriptions. Red Hat blocks access to the package repos entirely without a subscription (though it is free in certain cases) and Ubuntu pushes the Pro subscription at every opportunity and requires it for certain security updates.
I don’t get it… What is Ubuntu doing to enshittify their operating system that you can’t mitigate through source modifications or switching to another free OS?
Unlike Windows and Mac users, if my Linux distro does something that I disagree with, I feel that I have plenty of power to do things about it on multiple levels. I left Ubuntu years ago, but there are plenty of things the community can do to make things better without relying on Canonical to do anything at all.
Just because you can work around it doesn’t mean it’s not enshittification.
You’re avoiding the point: when you have the source code, the ability to build it yourself, and the right to continue community development in any direction you want, there is nothing that a company or any other entity can do to make your experience worse.
If I don’t like the direction of Lemmy, for example, there’s nothing that stops me from forking the last known good version and continuing to use/develop that myself for the rest of time. It’s fundamentally different than if you’re someone who uses Reddit, for example, and you’re 100% beholden to the whims of what the developers decide. That’s the point I’m making.
Call me a true believer, but I think FOSS is at least extremely resilient to enshittification. I say this as a long time FOSS user and current professional FOSS developer.
Yes, but that’s no longer Ubuntu, and it takes a lot more time and effort on your part to maintain your fork. That’s not sustainable, especially if it happens to multiple products.
Ubuntu?
What is Ubuntu doing to enshittify that can’t be fixed or mitigated by source modifications or forks?
Forking splits the community, development resources, etc and ensures Linux will stay irreverent to the home user.
If everyone switches over to the fork that’s great. But let’s be honest. Ubuntu isn’t going anywhere any time soon.
I disagree, forking and personal modification are the fundamental powers that FOSS licenses like the GPL and MIT give the user. They’re the whole point of why FOSS exists in the first place–it’s not about money, it’s about giving people the power to chance the source and build things for themselves.
Copyleft takes that idea one step further by asking them to share their changes, of course.
Obviously it’s great if everyone can align their ideas and desires to work together on a single thing, but the software world also benefits from having multiple projects with different directions and goals, because one-size-fits-all is never ideal.