by boltzmann-brain | 2025-12-29 04:23:52+00:00
> This article is lame. How about focusing on back-ends that pretend to support self-hosting but make it difficult by perpetuating massive gaps in its documentation (looking at you, Supabase)?

that's one way of enshittifying, but what the article talks about is nonetheless very important.

People rely on projects being open source (or rather: _hosted on github_) as some sort of mark of freedom from shitty features and burdensome monetization.

As the examples illustrate, the pattern of capturing users with a good offering and then subsequently squeezing them for money can very easily be done by open source software with free licenses. The reason for that is that source code being available is not, alone, enough to ensure not getting captured by adversarial interests.

What you ALSO need is people wanting to put in the work to create a parallel fork to continuously keep the enshittification at bay. Someone who rolls a distribution with a massive amount of ever-decaying patches, increasingly large amounts of workarounds, etc. Or, alternatively, a "final release" style fork that enters maintenance mode and only ever backports security vulnerability fixes. Either of those is a huge amount of work and it's not even sure that people will find that fork on their own rather than just assume "things are like that now".

Given that the code's originating corporation can and will eagerly throw whole teams of people at disabling such efforts, the counter-efforts would require the same amount of free labor to be successful - or even larger, given that it's easy to wreck things for the code's originator but it's difficult to fix them for the restoration crew.

This pattern, repeated in many projects over the decades since GPL2 and MIT were produced, displays that merely being free and open source does not create a complete anti enshittification measure for the end user. What is actually necessary is a societal measure, a safety web made up of developers dedicated to conservation of important software, who would be capable of correcting any stupid decisions made by pointy-haired managers. There are some small projects like this (eg Apache, and many more) but they are not all-encompassing and many projects that are important to people are without such a safety net.

So for this reason, eg when people are upset that mattermost limits the messages to 10000, their real quarrel isn't really even with the scorpion, who is known to sting, it is with the lack of there being a social safety net for this particular software. Their efforts would be well spent on rapidly building such a safety network to quickly force the corporation's hand into increasingly more desperate measures, accelerating their endgame and self-induced implosion. Then, after the corpo's greed inevitably makes them eat themselves in full, the software can enter the normal space of FOSS development rather than forever remain this corporate slave-product that is pact-bound to a Delaware LLC by a chain of corporate greed.

Only once any free fork's competition backed by VCs burning their money on a ceremonial heap has been removed can the free version of the software become the central source for all users and therefore become successful, rather than continuously play catch up with a throng of H-2B holders.