301 karma · joined July 4, 2022
This cracked me up
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Historically, open source meant "here's code, use it if it helps, fix it if it breaks." No support contracts, no timelines, no moral duty. GitHub-era norms quietly inverted that into unpaid service work, with entitlement enforced socially ("be nice", "maintainers owe users").
Intrinsic motivation is the only sustainable fuel here. Once you start optimizing for users, stars, adoption, or goodwill, pressure accumulates and burnout is inevitable. When you build purely because the work itself is satisfying, stopping is always allowed, and that's what keeps projects healthy.
Hard boundaries aren't hostility; they're corrective. Fewer projects would exist if more maintainers adopted them, but the ones that remain would be stronger, and companies would be forced to fund or own their forks honestly.
Open source doesn't need more friendliness. It needs less obligation
That said, I find myself increasingly at odds with the direction they're taking. The whole Snap vs. Flatpak debacle is exhausting, and personally, I'm not a fan of either. I'd take a standard apt repo over containerized desktop apps any day. Seeing core applications migrate to Snaps and the recent decision to move coreutils to alternate implementations feels like a bridge too far for my taste.
There's also the creeping Proprietary integrations to consider. To be honest, this is more of a philosophical stance than a practical one. Ubuntu is still a fantastic "get work done" distro, and I still use it on my office laptop because it just works and it's the only destro that got my employer's stamp of approval.
But for my personal setup? I've moved on. It's Arch for the desktop and Debian for servers. Nothing else really hits that sweet spot of control and simplicity for me anymore.
And the defaults don't help: instead of your ISP seeing your queries, now it's Cloudflare, Google, or whichever big player your browser hardcodes. That's not decentralization, it's centralization under a shinier marketing story.
Encryption is good, censorship resistance is good, but the rollout conveniently shifts power away from users and toward a handful of global DNS silos. For technical folks, it feels less like progress and more like lock-in with extra steps.