We all know the struggle of beloved services slowly going downhill. What’s one service, tool, or website you’ve been using for years that’s still great and hasn’t turned to crap?
We all know the struggle of beloved services slowly going downhill. What’s one service, tool, or website you’ve been using for years that’s still great and hasn’t turned to crap?
Well thankfully FOSS allows anyone to fork anything, so I imagine there will always be decent distros out there.
There’s still danger here. While anyone can fork, it’s painful and work-intensive. A well-funded actor could fork something useful, add a bunch of features the community wants, and do a shitty job of committing back. Once most of the community stops using the old stuff and the devs go back to their lives, we can lose control of useful stuff.
Stuff like when Signal enshittifies. It has enough inertia and spin up cost that the forks barely see any traffic.
The community is already full of so many people who would be willing to make actual, privacy-based distros and prorgrams.
FOSS exists because there are so many creative people who just want to make this shit for fun and the fuck of it. And I think most of them are not fascists.
Torvolds doesn’t make distros. The work that he’s doing isn’t highly creative. It’s boring pain and no one else really wants to take on. He doesn’t have a lot of competition, and hopefully, when he moves on, that vacuum gets another dedicated masochist and doesn’t just usher in a bunch of people bickering and at each other’s throats.