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.
Red Hat and Ubuntu are two that leap to mind.
What’s wrong with Ubuntu and RH? Is it because of the snaps / source code debacle? Both of those had solid business cases to them and while I dislike the outcome, I do understand why they made that choice and most importantly - I still appriciate what each company does for FOSS.
They took all the momentum from the community and put it behind a paywall. It used to be that you could use the whole thing for free and only needed to pay for support, but now you need to pay for subscriptions. Red Hat blocks access to the package repos entirely without a subscription (though it is free in certain cases) and Ubuntu pushes the Pro subscription at every opportunity and requires it for certain security updates.
I don’t get it… What is Ubuntu doing to enshittify their operating system that you can’t mitigate through source modifications or switching to another free OS?
Unlike Windows and Mac users, if my Linux distro does something that I disagree with, I feel that I have plenty of power to do things about it on multiple levels. I left Ubuntu years ago, but there are plenty of things the community can do to make things better without relying on Canonical to do anything at all.
Just because you can work around it doesn’t mean it’s not enshittification.
You’re avoiding the point: when you have the source code, the ability to build it yourself, and the right to continue community development in any direction you want, there is nothing that a company or any other entity can do to make your experience worse.
If I don’t like the direction of Lemmy, for example, there’s nothing that stops me from forking the last known good version and continuing to use/develop that myself for the rest of time. It’s fundamentally different than if you’re someone who uses Reddit, for example, and you’re 100% beholden to the whims of what the developers decide. That’s the point I’m making.
Call me a true believer, but I think FOSS is at least extremely resilient to enshittification. I say this as a long time FOSS user and current professional FOSS developer.
Yes, but that’s no longer Ubuntu, and it takes a lot more time and effort on your part to maintain your fork. That’s not sustainable, especially if it happens to multiple products.