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  • "Miss Movie Masochist"socketwench@masto.hackers.town
    Oct 14, 2026, 1:36 PM

    Open Source as a political ideal has always been that. While we have amazing OSS today, the dirty secret is as open as the source:

    The money has to come from somewhere.

    The time has to come from somewhere.

    The effort has to come from somewhere.

    And yes, these things are far, FAR more useful to the corps as a repository of free labor than they are as a political ideal or movement. If you've ever been inside an OSS foundation, you'll learn this in five minutes.

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Replies

  • "Miss Movie Masochist"socketwench@masto.hackers.town
    Oct 14, 2026, 1:39 PM

    It is then no wonder at all why the biggest projects fall to the slop machines. Why the biggest devs seem to have little interest in maintaining the political line.

    Because they historically. never. have.

    They wouldn't be big OSS devs with foundations behind them if they didn't. To them, it's simply survival to tow the line. "Just business".

    Corporate OSS has always been a paper wrapper of political ideal on top of free labor.

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  • "Miss Movie Masochist"socketwench@masto.hackers.town
    Oct 14, 2026, 1:42 PM

    "The Funding Problem" is why you're seeing OSS fall to LLMs day after day. We never solved it. To solve it would cost an astonishing amount of money, the kind most people simply do not have given how much wealth inequality we have as a society at present.

    The corps hoard.
    Governments are strapped.

    If you want to see OSS not fall to slop, devs need food, housing, healthcare, and safety.

    OSS falling to slop is a reflection of *society*. And yes, it's upsetting to see the wrapper torn off.

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  • Justinas Dūdėnasjustinas@soc.dudenas.lt
    Oct 16, 2026, 6:38 AM

    @socketwench this is why essential OSS projects should be considered a public good, similar to public spaces, and funded as such. It should not be difficult to adapt govt funding models similar to those for culture, which are designed for resistance to political whims. Much harder to convince politicians and society, that this is a serious issue, and worth funding regardless of country borders.

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  • maegulmaegul@hachyderm.io
    Oct 16, 2026, 7:18 AM

    @socketwench

    It always struck me as a cultural failure that tech workers didn’t expect as a minimum that their employers dedicate support either in money or employee hours to the OSS they relied on.

    Such an obvious cultural norm with obvious wins all around. Even law firms market their pro bono donations.

    Whenever I’ve brought it up with tech workers they’re surprised and stare into the distance. Goes to show how much eusocial DNA is in the industry.

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  • Todd Knarrtknarr@mstdn.social
    Oct 16, 2026, 4:44 PM

    @maegul @socketwench The problem is that requires compromising OSS values by making it not open-source to some degree where corporate use is concerned. Companies won't adopt the expectation of contributing without some sort of cost for failing to do so (thank you Milton Friedman... NOT!).

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  • maegulmaegul@hachyderm.io
    Oct 17, 2026, 4:17 AM

    @tknarr @socketwench

    Eh, it’s a cultural norm, same as giving tech workers break out rooms with, kombucha, ping pong tables and bean bags.

    Like I said, law firms in some places adopted it, in gōd part because their employees were happier to work somewhere that did it than one that didn’t.

    These things are possible. In tech, an obvious incentive on both sides of the employment is that employees get to know their tech stack better. More skills/reputation for the employees, even the employer, and an investment in the tech stack for the company.

    Dunno. Doesn’t seem hard.

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  • Todd Knarrtknarr@mstdn.social
    Oct 17, 2026, 4:40 AM

    @maegul @socketwench Except for Friedman: "The only priority of a company is to maximize shareholder value.". Most tech company execs follow Friedman at his most toxic. Contributing support to OSS takes money that could go to shareholders, therefore it's forbidden.

    They'll fork an OSS project and maintain it privately, with all the costs that entails, rather than see a penny go to supporting it. Yes, IMO they're insane. Sociopathic is the usual diagnosis.

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  • Cassandrichdalias@hachyderm.io
    Oct 16, 2026, 1:13 PM

    @socketwench There absolutely is a problem with funding, but the maintainers turning to slop are (mostly) not getting paid to do that, and plenty of us who also lack sufficient funding aren't gobbling up slop.

    The problem more is that we insisted on being "politically neutral" and trusted a bunch of untrustworthy ppl, contributing to their projects by writing code for them, integrating them with other things, using their software, donating money to them, etc.

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  • Martin Owens :inkscape: :flag_nonbinary:doctormo@floss.social
    Oct 16, 2026, 2:36 PM

    @dalias @socketwench

    To be fair to both arguments. I believe a lack of sustainable economic model makes us *vulnerable*.

    Both to stress and seeking salvation from a monkey's paw wish machine and from co-opting from corporations who can easily take over a project just by paying for someone to do some part time work on it.

    I see the folks most into AI in Free Software are usually corpos and Californians; not volunteers. At least in Gnome, and Inkscape so far.

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  • FoolishOwlfoolishowl@social.coop
    Oct 16, 2026, 3:31 PM

    @dalias @doctormo @socketwench I'd been subscribing to the "dual power strategy", where we overcome capitalism through loose networks of cooperative projects that meet our needs. I'd thought we'd find lessons in free software, both its successes and failures. And now I'm left wondering whether it was ever going to succeed, whether it was mostly government research spending that enabled it in the beginning and that its current general state was inevitable once that dried up.

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  • Cassandrichdalias@hachyderm.io
    Oct 16, 2026, 3:35 PM

    @foolishowl @doctormo @socketwench None of us who are actually doing the real thing are stopping.

    What's changed is the incentive structures for the folks who never actually believed in the purpose but who were riding the trend to get cushy tech industry careers and the companies that were exploiting "apolitical" tech nerd culture to get street cred for making things "open source".

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  • Cassandrichdalias@hachyderm.io
    Oct 16, 2026, 3:37 PM

    @foolishowl @doctormo @socketwench What we're going to have to learn and adapt to, quickly, is that we can't actually have this corporate-shitware scale of FOSS that's actually FOSS.

    These gigantic codebases only exist and seem to work as FOSS because corporations were getting something of value out of pretending to play the game.

    We need to be demanding and creating far smaller, far simpler things that actually meet human needs rather than optimizing to be Google-scale.

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  • FoolishOwlfoolishowl@social.coop
    Oct 16, 2026, 5:24 PM

    @dalias @doctormo @socketwench I'm not sure how you're constructing "we".

    Because I feel like in much of my political activism over thirty years, I've been trying to convince leftists to use free software instead of proprietary, and almost never succeeded. And now, I have to apologize to anyone who tried to follow my advice.

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  • Cassandrichdalias@hachyderm.io
    Oct 16, 2026, 5:40 PM

    @foolishowl @doctormo @socketwench I don't see why you'd apologize any more than you'd apologize for trying to convince them to vote for the meh candidate rather than the nazi or the spoiler candidate on nazi payroll.

    No matter how bad any of this gets, even the worst mismanaged FOSS is orders of magnitude less bad than the proprietary stuff full of dark patterns, spyware, backdoors, etc.

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  • Cassandrichdalias@hachyderm.io
    Oct 16, 2026, 5:43 PM

    @foolishowl @doctormo @socketwench To answer your question though, I am constructing "we" as "people who believe in a world where the machines we use to communicate, organize, publish, journal, make things, etc. are not controlled by fascists and made to work against us".

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  • Cycy@fedicy.us.to
    Oct 16, 2026, 10:41 PM
    You really have to redefine success in that case. Designing a system, however subversive, that exists separate from the current system is not going to make the current system go away. We have overcome capitalism through loose netwirks of cooperative projects that meet our needs. And then the capitalists destroy them. And then we make more. At the risk of sounding like a tankie I'm going to make the observation that anything which does not eliminate capitalism is not going to eliminate capitalism. So you live with it, fight for what you can together, and call that success. I guess.
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  • /usr/local/goth @ homeladytel@masto.hackers.town
    Oct 14, 2026, 1:44 PM

    @socketwench weird parallel but I was in Williamsburg Virginia where one of the trades people (Weaver) was saying, "not a lot of people did this job because if you're not growing tobacco you're not making money. Only people who did this work in Virginia were wealthy women who either had indentured servants or slaves to grow tobacco"

    Honestly, that's really sat with me during my trip

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