It’s an untenable situation because its so much bigger than the tech world and open source. FOSS fundamentally works on a communal model: everyone needs lots of software, no one can hope to write it all themselves, so what if we distributed the labor out among the community so that everyone can work on some things important to them and the whole community benefits.

Then, capitalist businesses entered the picture and began using more and more open software as backbone for their enterprises. Government entanglements further complicate the picture, but fundamentally the capitalist mindset is incapable of building or maintaining our current technological base. It isn’t capable of maintaining or building our infrastructure either: almost all of that was built on government subsidies, socialism.

And now that vulture capitalism is the law of the land, everything is falling apart because there’s no more “slack” in the system where people can engage in personal socialism on projects like FLOSS, every bit of our time is being stolen to pad the numbers of capitalists.

This bleeds over into attitude as well. Every entitled user who thinks their personal issue is more important than any other concern is a trump or musk in miniature, believing that the the blowhard bravado of our current government is a model for forcing work to get done rather than a death spiral there’s no pulling out of.

You want FLOSS software that’s good? You want less burden on maintainers? You want a safer, saner, more human-centric technology base? You want a better tech world?

Eat. The. Rich.

Public Money, Public Code. All governments should only be using FOSS software.

Everyone is feeling the squeeze. For the last couple years employer have been reducing staff and expecting those remaining to pick up the extra work while not increasing compensation. Then the employers report record profits and the news tells how great the economy is doing while we are all struggling.

Got a comment last week on one of the open-source projects I’m contributing to. We have an issue open, documenting that we’d like to support a certain feature, and this person clearly took quite a bit of time to pull together information, which gets us over the first major hurdle for this feature.

But also, this feature is really not the highest priority to us right now. Really had to stop myself from promising that we’d look into it in my response, because it is still quite a bit of work to actually make it a reality. I’m still new to all this, so I still have to learn to not feel bad about it. If they want to scratch their own itch, they’ll have to scratch it in full. That I’d review their code before merging, is honestly already quite a bit of effort put in by me for something that I don’t care to solve right now. That I take time to respond is basic decency, but still also uses up time. Really, I had not understood before, how much work it has to be for maintainers with an actually active community.

open source won the battle. now the corporations hope to win the war.

imo part of that involves squeezing & disrupting the volunteers and their communities. often by amplifying and pressuring existing issues.

meanwhile, the corporations can then throw their ample resources at steering things towards their selfish objectives

Maybe it’s time for a FOSS general strike.