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  • Francisco Tolmaskytolmasky@mastodon.social
    Oct 31, 2026, 3:01 AM

    And the fact that you’re not expanding your maintenance burden unboundedly isn’t even the real concern. The actual threat is that while your baseline maintenance is expanding, your open competitors have no such burden and are using those resources to instead focus on actual product and feature development to start running past you. This isn’t a hypothetical or even a prediction, users are already unlocking their devices. This is simply the new cost of maintaining these systems TODAY. (7/🧵)

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  • Francisco Tolmaskytolmasky@mastodon.social
    Oct 31, 2026, 3:08 AM

    That’s what I mean by all software is effectively open source by default now. You must expend tremendous energy to make software “simulate” its old closed behaviors, and the underlying frictions have flipped to naturally align with open systems, such that now even the legal tools are sort of redundant for us — the GPL isn’t what ensures software is user controlled, that’s just the new default nature of *all* software. Users can just circumvent barriers, suing for GPL violation is overkill. (8/🧵)

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  • Francisco Tolmaskytolmasky@mastodon.social
    Oct 31, 2026, 3:20 AM

    LLMs have undeniably had a ton of negative effects on open source, but I think we might be letting that distract us from recognizing that the larger macro shift that is taking place is that the environment has reconfigured itself to, perhaps for the first time, naturally advantage the actual original FOSS vision of the world. If nothing else, the open source models are the least negatively affected by these changes. (9/🧵)

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  • Francisco Tolmaskytolmasky@mastodon.social
    Oct 31, 2026, 3:31 AM

    I think FOSS has a real opportunity to proactively work to surface and understand these newfound advantages to ultimately actively exploit them. Look, the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs sucked no question about it, but it is also true that that asteroid was undeniably good for team mammals. Suddenly our weird mammal adaptations aren’t merely survival-grade, we find ourselves in a world where they’re actually now apex predator caliber. We should proceed accordingly (10/10)

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