Free software/open source won't save us (a rant)warning: barely edited complaining inbound!
It is fucking sick and tired of people acting like open source is the solution to "enshittification". It's not. It is sick of people acting like something being open source means it is more trustworthy. It doesn't. It is sick of people acting like something being open source means it isn't going to be mismanaged. It doesn't. Free and Open Source Software advocates have been extremely quick to capitalize on the extreme downturn in the quality of notable pieces of software like windows or the adobe suite to push this idea that they somehow have the answer to all these problems, and they don't. They never did and never will.
Off the bat, it wants to clear up that it doesn't think that sharing the source code of a piece of software is a bad thing. It has its complaints with certain things that are held as tenets of the free software movement (especially what GNU calls "freedom 0", that's a whole other rant) but in general, it thinks sharing is good. It just doesn't think it solves most of the problems that advocates claim it solves.
Open Source software isn't resistant to capitalism or to user-hostile trends in design. Visual Studio Code being open source is a way for microsoft to get free labor for their product. Firefox is open source and technically nonprofit, and has been uncritically filling their browser with AI antifeatures that do nothing but waste catastrophic amounts of energy. Mastodon, despite doing most than most open source projects to try and explicitly resist the influence of capitalism, solves practically none of the issues with for-profit social media because it apes the trends of the commercial stuff in terms of retention and addictive properties.
Any claims about security are also bullshit. Simply having the source available to be audited doesn't mean that audits happen and nor does it mean developers are inherently held accountable for hostile changes. In fact, an poorly managed piece of open source software is far more vulnerable to somebody hiding malicious code in a pull request that gets accepted. Good security practice has nothing to do with the code being open source, it's good security practice no matter if it's open source or not.
Any claims about open source promoting democratic management or giving software development back "to the people" are, surprisingly, also bullshit. If anything, open source software promotes a very specific development model of a project lead on top (or small core team) who make every decision and a large group of contributors who contribute their work to the project but get practically no say. This is the community that came up with the term "Benevolent Dictator for Life" to cope with the fact that their supposedly democratic movement leads to the creation of a vast swathe of little fiefdoms with no accountability. Open source does nothing to prevent practical monopolies, too, and in fact somewhat promotes them. If you're a developer looking to work on a vector drawing tool, it's gonna be much easier to make a few PRs to inkscape then starting from scratch.
They'll claim that the solution to this is to fork software that is managed in a way you don't agree with, but maintaining a fork is a lot of effort. It requires your new team taking on the workload of the original team, somehow marketing your version as better, making everybody care about it, and getting people to switch to the more principled version. Every time it hears somebody bring up forking as a solution to mismanagement it can't help but wonder. Maintain a fork with the help of who? Fucking Aquaman? See Calibre, a project that started adding AI features out of nowhere because the creator liked them. A fork, arcalibre, exists and has support behind it, but is unlikely to be ready for use any time soon because of the amount of work that has to go into even getting a project like that functioning outside of its previous infrastructure.
Free Software vs Open Source doesn't matter in this, by the way. It's just a dispute about terminology relating to specificities of licensing. Any claim that Free Software advocates make about what they do is as nonsensical as the ones that open source advocates make. The non-commercial clause in the GNU Public License (the holy text of the Free Software asshole) means nothing regarding software not going to shit. Just that somebody won't directly steal it and start charging money for it.
It's also worth noting that there is a lot of services aligned with "open source" that are demonstrably more principled than their proprietary counterparts, but this has nothing really to do with them being open source. Good security practice, user-focused goals and good management are entirely tangential to the thing being open source. They're results of other decisions, usually highly political, on the part of the creators of those projects. For example, Codeberg manages to be better than Github (as long as you are happy accepting the comorbid "free software" bogus with their work) because they're donation funded and run for a political purpose. The funding model is what makes them more accountable, not that they use free software for their service. And open source is independent of any funding model.
There is a lot of good in the open source world but the fact it is open source has nothing to do with that. The reason that good is there is because there's people who care about other things, people who are politically motivated, and people who want things to be better, who have ended up in open source because they think sharing is good. But being open source has nothing to do with those good things, it's a side effect of projects run by motivated folks who want the world to be better. It's not the solution to any of these problems, it's a quality that tends to arise as a side effect of people who want to solve them.
So yeah. This was mostly just it wanting to point out its problems with a specific kind of guy who seems pervasive in spaces it exists in despite its attempts to stay the fuck away, but if there's an actual message it's this. Be fucking critical of supposed panacea. One change rarely fixes everything, or fixes anything at all.