2025-08-15
If you interact with the open source community or any community with similar vibes, you have probably either watched the recent video by Louis Rossmann, or seen a lot of images of the old Microsoft mascot clippy. Essentially the point is that people want corporations to make products that are just there to help you, like clippy was just there to help. The idea is to criticise bad and invasive software as a group, but before the second video came out, which outlines real action people can take against corporations making software that exploits people for profit, I was thinking about the point of the movement at all, but not for the reasons of "changing a profile picture won't make any real change". It was because the core thesis of the video is that corporations used to make things that just wanted to help you, like clippy. Clippy did not spy on you, sell your data, manipulate you into voting a particular way or constantly track every bit of useful information about you, clippy just wanted to help!
The ""issue"" 1 I have with Louis' presentation is that it does not really highlight the fact that there are people that still want nothing more than to help, and instead seems to say that the only option is to regulate corporations so they make good software again.
It did used to look like the mega corps of today cared for their users and the software they released (this will all focus on software, because I like software), this is because they needed to seem that way. No one willingly using bad software today, they do it either because they have no other option, or because they do not know how bad it is. For a corporation to get to the point where people have no other option than to use their product, they need to get a huge amount of market dominance, embed themselves into the structures of schools, other cooperation's, government agencies and the military. The only way to do this? make good software!
This is very reminiscent of modern day venture capital, but done for slightly different reasons. Most modern startups will make a.. 'good' product and then get a user base hooked on it, and since we are in the era of fucking-everything-as-a-service this usually involves a monthly subscription. During the first phase, they ** money and they make it up with venture capital funding, all while getting more and more people on the service, and also selling data on the side. When the investors and shareholders inevitably start asking questions about when a profit will be made, the company switches to the second phase. They start sucking as much money in as many ways possible, they raise prices, make new subscription theirs, collect and sell more data, personalise advertisements to make people more angry, add advertisements to an already paid service. And then they die. All the space to embed into existing structures and governments has been taken by the giants like Microsoft and Google, so modern startups just die.
So it is pretty clear that the cause of terrible software (and all products) that exploit the consumer is the profit motive, and we live under capitalism, that will not change for a while. I just wish there was a dedicated group of people making good software with no profit motive...
Open source is the answer to bad software, hardware and services. Putting the tools that people use in control of the people that use them is the only real way to keep having good tools. Anything else, and someone will see a chance to make money, and do so.
In my experience, open source developers generally do it for a few reasons:
Most probably do it for a combination of all, I know that I do. The important part is that the software is free and not just in price. Free to distribute, free to modify and redistribute and free forever. Not many people make a living, or any money at all from contributing and maintaining open source projects, and most who do make it through optional donations, which they almost certainly would loose if they revoked the open source licence and stopped distributing the source. They are only motivated by making their software good for themselves and for others, they have no reason to spy on users, sell their data, manipulate them or raise the subscription prices, because there are no subscriptions and if they did start spying and selling data, it would be noticed.
Just using it will make it more popular, talking about it makes it more popular. If someone needs a tool to do something, recommend something open source. The whole clippy thing fits into this in a similar way as was said in the second video, people who know they are on the same page about this stuff can work together to start using it in their organisation. Use of open source software will increase and people will be better for it
Contributing with code is great, but that is not the only way, issues feature requests and documentation are just as important!
bug reports & feature requests
A good bug report or a well outlined feature request takes load off the programmers and helps to focus their labour, and helps improve the software. It is impossible to make software better without identifying the problems and areas of enhancement.
documentation
Documentation can be one of the hardest part of maintaining an open source software, it is high effort and hard to get right, but anyone can write documentation. Notice an error in the docs? fix it! is something not mentioned that could be helpful? add it!
Holding corporations accountable is important, but software written in the interest of endless profit will never be good software, and never be made in the interest of users over profit. This also goes for all products, until the working class has control over the products and tools they use, they will forever be exploited by those who control them. The best thing we can do for software right now is to use open source.
It’s a corporation’s purpose to put profits over people Deny, defend, depose, how do you think that that’s not evil?
- Cheap Perfume - Woke Mind Virus
i do not really have an issue but i do not know how else to put it ↩