Obviously we all want to avoid enshittified (aggressively monetized) software or at least get our money’s worth. I’m looking at self-hosting software right now and one I’m looking has a pricing page but only for cloud (no other paywalled features) and is open source. I tried looking up future plans and didn’t find much, so it doesn’t seem like it will enshittify. (not related) I had thought about switching to Omnivore for a long time but then they merged with ElevenLabs and the rest is history.
Android, Chromium.
The problem is that:
And so long as a fork is unlikely, Google can do shitfuckery quite similar to proprietary projects.
Small teams are unable to take web browsers far in another direction as browsers have recklessly grown to one of the largest and most complicated software. Browsers do not follow the “do one thing well” philosophy, to the extreme.
Most functional parts of a browser (text reader, video player) are thankfully resistant to enshitification. That is if they are free (libre), permitting a fork.
Ok, but what’s stopping them other than a lack of desire?
FOSS programs can always be forked and developed independently of the original authors. That’s the “freedom” that makes them FOSS in the first place. I have no desire to make my own fork of Android and its tooling, but if someone out there really wanted to do so, I don’t see what is stopping them. (Other than things like locked down smart phone bootloaders, but that’s got nothing to do with the FOSS part of this discussion.)
I’m kind of skeptical of this idea. FOSS has almost always been able to succeed in the long term despite having a small fraction of the development budget of proprietary software, often due to the passion of weekend devs essentially donating their time to the cause. Whether it’s Linux, Blender, Gitlab, Godot, Krita, etc., I can’t think of a single FOSS project that has funding anywhere near the same level as their corporate rivals.
See, I disagree on that. If I know something I could (help to) build will only ever be used by a few folks and can never help most people, then my motivation is significantly lowered. Well, unless I’m truly just scratching my own itch, but even then I might choose to not scratch my itch, because I’d rather quit using the platform, if possible.
And then, yeah, what the other person said about financing.
For Android, there are various small efforts in terms of forks, with the biggest being LineageOS. There are even some commercial efforts, like /e/OS. I think, Huawei also wanted to do a fork or something. No idea what happened with that.
But yeah, none of these efforts are hard forks, which can change more than superficial stuff. And it’s not for a lack of desire, but because it’s just such a ridiculous uphill battle to try to get anything noteworthy changed. Many times, LineageOS (and its predecessor CyanogenMod) had some cool features, which they later had to scrap, because they needed to follow what Google was doing and their features wouldn’t work with that anymore. If they would’ve seen any chance of a hard fork working out, they probably would’ve tried to go that route.
What you’re saying is right about the possibility, but when you’re assessing some software for yourself, you have to consider things in the bigger perspective.
Some protects are very complex and require multiple teams of developers to maintain. That’s different than a small project that one person can maintain and curate external contributions.
So something like Chromium or Flutter isn’t the type of software that a community will self organize and maintain, they need some sort of organization behind them. This organization will probably need some sort of funding, ex: donations. Otherwise the projects will either fall into chaos and die or they’ll look for other ways to support themselves (ex: Qt with their commercial license and paywalled features).
In practice everything needs resources and without these resources any project simply dies.