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.
- What is their monetization model? If you read the original article defining ‘enshittificaiton’, it’s clear how this factors in. FOSS projects tend to avoid this, and in the occasional cases where they are sold and aggressively monetized, there are usually forks (see: audacity->tenacity). With donation-run but non-open services, you really just have to hope. If it’s unclear or for-profit, avoid wherever possible (unfortunately not always possible).
That’s the bottom line.
You can never be 100% sure, but there are protective factors that make it less likely, and they mostly boil down to incentive structure:
- Ownership - Is the project run by a non-profit? A for-profit company? A hobbyist? This is the best indicator of a project’s long-term trajectory, because it generally indicates the purpose behind creating it.
- Business model - How does the project make money? Donations? Subscription? One time payment? Generally models where you can outright purchase a copy of a particular version is insulated against future updates you don’t like. Donations protect against exploitation, but run the risk of the project being unsustainable and abandoned.
- Source - Open source code isn’t a silver bullet, but (especially with good licensing) it can make enshittification less likely as it’s a lot easier for dissenters to spin up a fork / competitor. It also makes it very difficult to hide sketchy stuff like data collection and back doors.
- Red flags - You should avoid anything that is SaaS, backed by an investment firm, or publicly traded. All of these involve incentive structures that encourage and reward exploitation of consumers and employees for increasing profit margins.
Unfortunately, the availability of “one time purchase” is not a guarantee anymore as more and more devs have killed existing versions sold with perpetual licences.
Look for escape hatches. I run a self-hosted Cloudron server. The software I host on my home server is FOSS via Cloudron, but Cloudron itself is a service that keeps each of the FOSS apps up to date with security upgrades and data migrations when necessary. It’s a huge boon to running a self-hosted server.
But when it comes down to it, they could potentially close up somehow (new leadership, get bought out, shut down etc.) They’ve left an escape hatch though–you can bundle and build your own apps, with a CloudronManifest.json etc. This would allow me to continue to run and update software if I absolutely needed to, without their support.
Ability to export data to a relevant, open standard. If I can jump ship at the drop of a hat, then I’ll consider it. I won’t buy if I don’t have that power.
Green flags:
- copyleft license (GPL or better AGPL) + they accept contributions without contributor license agreement
- code written by many people who personally own the copyright
- active community
Yellow flags:
- permissive license
- business model which can’t be really be sustainable with a shit-free product
Red flags:
- VC funding (implies enshittification in future because of profit maximization)
- proprietary license
- project does not take contribution from the outside or asks to transfer copyright or sign some document (CLA)
Enshittification is built-in to Capitalism, the Tendency for the Rate of Profit to Fall forces it. FOSS and whatnot is safe.
You dont.
Obviously copyleft license and stuff that embraces FOSS is great, but open source licensing doesn’t bar the key developers paywalling features. You just have to avoid building digital systems around a single point of failure where possible.
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:
- Google puts in more development power than anyone else. Any forks we’ve seen so far are only really soft forks, as in they only apply a few patches on top of what Google puts out, rather than taking the project in a new direction, because you’d be behind pretty quickly.
- These projects establish platforms that have shitty decisions baked in. For example, the Android dev tooling has Google ads/tracking as one of the built-in UI components, which is why even if you patch the OS, the apps will still be shitty. To actually change this stuff, you’d need a majority of users to switch to your fork and stay there for a few years.
- Partially, it’s only financially viable for Google to develop these projects, because they have those Android ads or benefit from a web with less tracking protection. This makes it extremely unlikely for any other organization to be able to splurge a similar amount of money, which brings us back to a fork just being unlikely.
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.
Google puts in more development power than anyone else. Any forks we’ve seen so far are only really soft forks, as in they only apply a few patches on top of what Google puts out, rather than taking the project in a new direction, because you’d be behind pretty quickly.
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.)
Partially, it’s only financially viable for Google to develop these projects, because they have those Android ads or benefit from a web with less tracking protection. This makes it extremely unlikely for any other organization to be able to splurge a similar amount of money, which brings us back to a fork just being unlikely.
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.
My basic check is: Are there investors / vc people involved? If so, then it will inevitably enshittify. If not, then requires further investigation. OSI-approved open source is a big plus
Even when choosing what seems like good software, I think it’s important to consider switching costs. How easily can you move to another solution, say the second pick, if things go south?
This is absolutely the answer. If it isn’t funneling money away from actual value creation and into their pockets, it’s evil in the mind of the investors.
Two very good points here. The second is the one I’ve been thinking about recently. It’s about considering what format your data is kept in and if you can usably get that out and implement it somewhere else without too much work.
Personally, I’m at the point where I try to only use community-developed software. I’ve seen it too often that even projects which are nominally open-source start becoming cunts…
Agreed. The downside of community developed software is it can very easily die. All too often almost all of the work is done by one or a few very active people. When they stop working on the project it’s a matter of luck if someone is willing to take it on. I’ve lost more than a few good tools that way.
I don’t think you can. But if it’s open source and popular, there might be a chance it will have a maintained fork should that happen.
Freemium feature creep might be a sign things are changing for the worst, as in, if more and more features are being added to the premium plan and the free version is stagnating; to the point the target public of the premium version is creeping to average users instead of aiming at commercial or power users.
I think i have 3 big criteria:
- Track record
- Structuring things to pre-emptively keep themselves (and more importantly, those who might take over later) honest and aligned with the collective good
- Good people involved and ideally in charge of the project
Other people have mentioned things like venture capital and that’s certainly something to bear in mind (arguably part of the structure), but there are projects like Matrix where that feels quite marginal to me, the aforementioned aspects more than make up for it.
Like when the main figurehead of the project goes on stage and nerds out about the code, that’s a pretty fucking good sign in my book.I like to see companies design their software such that their main financial incentives are tied to the quality of their product. This usually involves being open source; if someone can fork it, your paywalled version better have extra features that open source people can’t make easily. I also like to see them trying to avoid vendor lockin; if it’s easy for you to switch, then they need to actively work on not letting that happen.
For example, Bluesky. They have an open protocol and (I think) you can easily transfer data between instances. If they start fucking people around, you can just jump to another ATProto app.
For Kagi, the only thing you’re paying for is search… So if they fuck that up, you can just crawl back to DuckDuckGo.
Obsidian is an interesting case. It’s not open source, but the files it works on are just markdown. If they go totally wild, I can just easily switch to VSCodium to edit my files.
For example, Bluesky. They have an open protocol and (I think) you can easily transfer data between instances. If they start fucking people around, you can just jump to another ATProto app.
I’ve never touched bluesky but everyone on Lemmy seems to be constantly saying that there are no other instances
There are, but as long as 98% of the userbase is all on the main instance the decentralization provides little protection from the whims of corporate.
Nobody seems to be putting the effort into making ATProto federated apps, sadly. The main people who would do it are also the type to stubbornly stick with ActivityPub.
it’s basically the exact same thing as i’ve seen with IRC, people keep saying it’s decentralized and then when asked to show an example they just go “yeah well uhh obviously it’s not externally decentralized duhhh! It’s ✨internally decentralized✨” which just means they protocol makes horizontal scaling easy…
If it’s not running on the cloud, I can always just stay on an old version. If it’s open source, that old version can be maintained and updated indefinitely.
I’ve been focused, lately, on separation of concerns. Yeah, using FOSS tools is great, but I’m also asking myself how much losing a given tool will impact me if I start to rely on it.
This past weekend I finally broke away from ProtonMail. After what the CEO has been saying, and because of other annoyances like being unable to use anything but their clients, it was finally time to rip that bandaid off.
Unfortunately, I made the mistake of using a standard protonmail.com email address, so now I have to tell everyone to stop using that. Also, I was a heavy user of SimpleLogin for creating email aliases for basically every service I signed up for, and now I have to switch all of those.
I should have learned this lesson when I left Google, but this time I will be using my own domain. I also took this opportunity to leave Cloudflare entirely.
Now I have a domain for my email address and my website through porkbun, but can transfer that to another registrar if they start to suck.
I use desec.io for my DNS needs instead of the built-in porkbun DNS tools to make it easier to switch to a different registrar if I need to. They’re a non-profit, and it’s open source software that I could potentially selfhost in the future. This also replaced Cloudflare.
I use fastmail.com for the actual email service, which let’s me use the apps I like on my phone and PC to interact with email the way I want.
Fastmail also has a service like SimpleLogin, but instead I went with addy.io (also FOSS; also potentially selfhostable) with another custom domain at porkbun.
My website is a blog hosted by write.as, which is, again, built around FOSS and selfhostable software.
All of these pieces can be swapped out without affecting the others if need be, bringing switching costs to near-zero, and making it very customizable in the process.
