Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending Sunday 1 September 2024

Not a sneer, but another cool piece from Baldur Bjarnason: The slow evaporation of the free/open source surplus.

Gonna skip straight to near the end, where Baldur lays out a potential apocalypse scenario for FOSS as we know it:

Best case scenario, seems to me, is that Free and Open Source Software enters a period of decline. After all, that’s generally what happens to complex systems with less investment. Worst case scenario is a vicious cycle leading to a collapse:

1. Declining surplus and burnout leads to maintainers increasingly stepping back from their projects.
2. Many of these projects either bitrot serious bugs or get taken over by malicious actors who are highly motivated because they can’t relay on pervasive memory bugs anymore for exploits.
3. OSS increasingly gets a reputation (deserved or not) for being unsafe and unreliable.
4. That decline in users leads to even more maintainers stepping back.

Linking this to a related sneer, another major problem that I can see befalling FOSS is earning a reputation as a Nazi bar. How high that risk is I'm not sure, but between the AI bubble shredding tech's public image and our very good friends increasingly catching the public's attention, I suspect those chances are pretty high.