this post was submitted on 12 Feb 2025
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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
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Just use open source software?
Just because it's open source and anyone could theoretically fork it doesn't mean it can't be enshitified.
It absolutely does... Can you elaborate on a situation in which FOSS gets enshittified?
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.
The Simple Mobile Tools collection of Android apps. Forks have been made and are maintained fortunately, but the original autor sold the apps to some company that just adds ads and trackers to the apps to make more money out of it.
My two examples are of OS SaaS that got their plug pulled before they got to that stage. See skiff.com and omnivore.
I'm not familiar with either of those projects or what you mean by "that stage", but why can't you and the community around them just fork them and continue development in a way that you prefer? What's stopping you?
There are various obstacles to "just forking" a project; it requires times to understand the frameworks / libraries used in the project, understand the code and its different parts and last but not least, have a interest to invest that time and energy (most often, that time could be spent developing your own solution that would fit your usecase better).
As for the stage I was referring to, both the theories of enshittification and rot-economy see software and services going through stages to attract new users, before going in for the profit maximizing.
Ubuntu?
What is Ubuntu doing to enshittify that can't be fixed or mitigated by source modifications or forks?
Forking splits the community, development resources, etc and ensures Linux will stay irreverent to the home user.
If everyone switches over to the fork that's great. But let's be honest. Ubuntu isn't going anywhere any time soon.
I disagree, forking and personal modification are the fundamental powers that FOSS licenses like the GPL and MIT give the user. They're the whole point of why FOSS exists in the first place--it's not about money, it's about giving people the power to chance the source and build things for themselves.
Copyleft takes that idea one step further by asking them to share their changes, of course.
Obviously it's great if everyone can align their ideas and desires to work together on a single thing, but the software world also benefits from having multiple projects with different directions and goals, because one-size-fits-all is never ideal.