Will free and open-source software survive - my opinion

Free and open-source software is now going strong with extremely popular and even industry standard products. However with fame always comes abuse which unfortunately affected FOSS as well.

In recent times we saw separate political decisions by big FOSS companies/teams such as the Linux kernel development team prohibiting citizens of Russia to contribute to the project, as well as general rise of political (specifically aggressive left and ultraleft leaning) drama and discussions in the space.

This makes me believe that the situation is only going to get worse. I can't be sure if projects will start implementing restrictions on their use (therefore switching to a model that is not considered free and open-source) but it's clear that contributions will likely and increasingly continue to be affected. This may cause all kinds of issues, up to addition of malicious code that starts on certain (and obviously unreasonable) triggers.

A complete death of the free and open-source model is practically impossible. There will always be people making their code truly free (as in freedom), at least for a limited time. Though when it comes to big players, their free future is at a significant risk.

"But I can always fork it!" - sure you can and your project might even gain solid ground but the political issues will remain, both for you and your contributors.

"Then how do I fix it?" - it's simple - keep unrelated politics away from your and others' projects and don't ban contributors who have political activity of any kind outside your projects, even if you disagree with them. Also create a separate account on social media for all politics-related discussions. Do not use your developer account or especially your project's official account.