Surely AI can just take it on...
Another open source project dies of neglect, leaving thousands scrambling
There were lots of announcements about Kubernetes at KubeCon North America in Atlanta. I should know, I was there from beginning to end. But the biggest Kubernetes story of all didn't get much attention. Kubernetes is retiring its popular Ingress NGINX controller. Ingress NGINX goes to that big bit farm in the sky in March 2026 …
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Tuesday 2nd December 2025 12:19 GMT Lazlo Woodbine
Re: Yeah, right
When you go see a stand-up, it's reasonable to assume everything said is a joke.
In a purely text based medium, where some people sometimes say the most stupid things and really mean them, it's usually best to indicate a joke is a joke if you want to avoid being flamed...
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Tuesday 2nd December 2025 21:44 GMT Jou (Mxyzptlk)
Re: Yeah, right
You just don't understand it. Literally :D.
This could help: https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=american+reacts+extra+3
With Max Gierman, playing Trump way too perfect: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=srL4_9ctktc
This could help too: https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=americans+react+heute+show
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Wednesday 3rd December 2025 10:46 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Slashdot still exists? Who knew!
Someone pointed out that if you want to sign up for Slashdot as a new user, you now have to manually email the administrators:-
"New user registration is now approved by Slashdot administrators. Please contact feedback@slashdot.org and let us know why you are interested in registering, and what you can add to the discussion."
The page looks very basic, like an emergency placeholder. And apparently this was in response to bot activity IIRC, but I checked and it's been like that for a year or two now.
Slashdot- which even I eventually stopped using in the late 2010s- was already a "legacy" site, but it's not even trying now.
No Gen-Z type is going to go through the bizarrely anachronistic process of sending off an introductory, self-justifying email to use a site whose heyday was before they were born and which clearly isn't interested in attracting them anyway.
I've no idea who's still.using it, but without new users, it's a dead man walking, surviving purely on inertia.
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Wednesday 3rd December 2025 13:56 GMT Steve B
Funny that you say that.
I always say the difference between UK comedy and US comedy is that UK comedy happens, you either get it or miss it, whereas US comedy, particularly film and TV basically has a "funny coming up" warning or two followed by the supposedly funny bit and followed by a "that was the funny bit" conclusion.
So you are right really!
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Tuesday 2nd December 2025 11:27 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Yeah, right
I find it best to assume that the letters "AI" form a single word, pronounced in a broad west country accent. Thus, a sentence containing the word "AI" becomes a statement that the speaker is taking full responsibility for the task in hand. e.g.
"Surely AI can just take it on".
Would then indicate a willingness to maintain the project.
Other examples include:-
"AI can create the documentation".
"AI will handle the phone calls from customers"
and so on....
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Tuesday 2nd December 2025 10:19 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: " Most of you have probably never heard of FFmpeg."
That seems to be typical of the dumbing down of this site since it was taken over by some US mega corp.
Just look at what is happening in Trumpistan. Nurses and a load of other professions including Accountants and Architects are no longer recognised by the Department of Education.
https://gulfnews.com/world/americas/nursing-architecture-accounting-occupational-therapy-physical-therapy-special-education-public-health-social-work-no-longer-considered-professions-under-us-rule-1.500360018
That limits the loan funding these former professions can get.
Dumbing down at work in front of our very eyes.
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Tuesday 2nd December 2025 11:01 GMT BJC
Re: WTF?
Personally, no, I've not had direct use of FFmpeg - never been on my radar. That just hasn't been necessary for the hard embedded systems with which I generally work. I've lots of other knowledge, that runs quite deep, in my corner of experience. However, IT and software development is such a large topic now, it seems reasonable that we all have areas of less knowledge.
That said, I'd have been ok looking it up had it not been stated in the article and I do come here because I expect to get more depth to the reporting (and comments) than other sites.
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Tuesday 2nd December 2025 11:37 GMT BJC
Re: WTF?
>> Doesn't everyone experiment?
Yep, but I still touch only a fraction of the current IT sphere.
At one time, I thought I had quite a good handle on things more generally (although that was several years ago). The older I get, the more I appreciate what I don't know! That can be a blessing and a curse. It's good to have more knowledge and identify better solutions but that knowledge can also make it easier to see the potential problems and that isn't always appreciated (as pointed out in the comments section of a different article).
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Wednesday 3rd December 2025 10:07 GMT Peter Gathercole
Re: WTF?
I'd like to know what an IT guy is.
I know, they teach this IT thingy in schools now, so is it knowing what Excel and Word are, and that that Chrome icon on the desktop gets you access to Google, and how to write some HTML (this seems to cover most of what they teach about 'IT' in schools).
Me. I studdied Computing at Uni. Came out in the early '80s knowing how to program in three high-level languages and two assemblers, what an RDB did and how to manage a simple one, and some rather obtuse mathematics on set theory and boolean logic. I also did some computer architecture, knowing the components of a computer, how a couple of the then popular architectures worked, and a little bit of digital electronics, with some of the electroncs theory behind these things (I did an Electronics module as well). Oh. I also learned how to get a perfect score in Colossal Cave!
Back in the late '70s, computers were much more easily understood.
But I wasn't an IT person yet (would not have really been possible, the term IT had not really be defined then). That came later, after years of working in administration, support, system integration, networking and a little bit of teaching (of computing in general, and various OS's and applications in particular), all while the computing environment was evolving closer to where it is now.
I think I only became a really useful 'IT' person after about 10 years of mostly self teaching and experience in the field. And that's my own self appraisal. Others may regard me differently, one way or the other!
I came across FFmepg when working out how to rip DVDs so I could watch them on my phone (a Palm Treo) and Linux laptop before things like YouTube, Netflix and other streaming services were even running. And I learned that many of the other streaming and transcoding apps really rely on some of the underlying components of FFmpeg in order to work!
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Tuesday 2nd December 2025 16:41 GMT Persona
Re: WTF?
I've probably heard of it but as "media" has never been my thing I'm not familiar enough with it to be able to go from a description of what it does to what it's called. The same applies to audio processing. I had no idea what the audio equivalent of FFmpeg was till I looked it up, yet people into sound processing would be aghast that others didn't know it. I'm purposely not naming it as that would make it too easy for people to remember they had heard of it.
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Wednesday 3rd December 2025 08:45 GMT Lee D
Re: WTF?
They still haven't managed IPv6 yet, despite over a decade of "it's coming soon", and yet still keep writing articles about how the world's going to end unless websites get on board and support it.
The sad fact is that, I suspect, almost all tech journalists aren't actually that techy. And I suspect that may have been true for longer that I would like to admit, for all those decades of reading ZX Spectrum magazines right up to the PC Magazine and PC Pro tutorials I used to hoard.
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Tuesday 2nd December 2025 10:33 GMT jake
"If we don't, you can kiss the open source free ride goodbye."
No. The FOSS world in general will be with us until the heat-death of the Universe, and most likely after.
What will go away is big, boring, complicated projects that barely anybody knows exist. But that's OK, because the useful little bits of the dead projects will be rebuilt as discrete components, if and as needed.
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Tuesday 2nd December 2025 11:15 GMT VoiceOfTruth
Re: "If we don't, you can kiss the open source free ride goodbye."
>> big, boring, complicated projects
I have nothing against big boring complicated projects per se. But I agree with your point. Kubernetes is a big project used by big companies. It hardly has any relevance to Joe sitting at home using his Linux desktop. Joe's beardy mate might install it for bragging rights or to learn about it, but that is not the same thing as needing it. If Ingress NGINX is so important, let these big companies that use it stump up some cash. It was the same thing with log4j - lots of chest beating from people who contributed nothing but spite.
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Tuesday 2nd December 2025 23:54 GMT notiggy
Re: "If we don't, you can kiss the open source free ride goodbye."
The problem is that most big companies use whatever ingress controller works with their cloud of choice (AWS LB controller, GKE ingress controller, etc). So it's really just smaller shops that are trying to save the cost of the load balancer, or people running k8s outside of the big clouds. Both of which are probably not in the financial position to pay for this (unless it was 50000 of them paying a buck a year or something, but that's been tried so many times and never worked).
I'm any case there are other projects that can easily fill this void (Caddy has an ingress controller and a gateway API controller, Traefik, Istio, etc). The only reason the nginx ingress controller is so heavily used is not because it's the better product, but because it was in some doc somewhere at the right time and everybody copied and pasted that to a bunch of other docs.
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Tuesday 2nd December 2025 15:54 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: "If we don't, you can kiss the open source free ride goodbye."
the useful little bits of the dead projects will be rebuilt as discrete components, if and as needed
Hopefully true, but also not always fun.
AC today because the related anecdote from $JOB is that a grand project was conceived and funding obtained to build an all-singing, all-dancing GUI utility to replace a creaky old existing thing (which a decade later is even creakier, but still just about works). Said utility never quite worked properly, partly due to a greater desire to write code rather than to understand the problems users had with it (particularly why they might find frequent crashing inconvenient) and is long abandoned, but not before it dragged in various other things that were being used and still are. Cue much recent painful pulling apart of complicated superbuild setups that were integrating multiple C++ frameworks to persuade a few command line tools to build.
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Wednesday 3rd December 2025 19:44 GMT Snake
Re: the heat-death of the Universe and most likely after
I don't know if that is true. FOSS exists off the backs of hard-working programmers of all types, both professional and hobbyist, but to believe that they will *always* be willing to donate their energies and time is rather presumptuous of us all. FOSS lives by their grace and we can never, nor should we ever, take that for granted, lest we see more projects end up like this one as well as the many, many other open source projects now marked 'abandoned'.
Programmers are donating their mental skills and their time to create these works but this is always based on a human factor: that the programmers HAVE both the mental skills and the [willingness of] time to donate, and either can disappear in a whiff of societal economic or political struggles.
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Tuesday 2nd December 2025 11:31 GMT ATrickett
See also XYZ..
I remember an interview with the creator and main maintainer of DNSmasq. He gets the odd payment to fix/change things but basically everyone uses his code and 99.9% don't contribute anything.
It's a common problem and too many big firms are good at taking and not so good at giving back.
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Tuesday 2nd December 2025 18:50 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: See also XYZ..
The difference (and I realise it is minor), is that most corporations used to have at least someone working on interoperability, even if it was to fulfill compliance or whatever. Now they will bend over backwards to avoid hiring that person at all, even if it means sacrificing future internal development.
This is what the "man-month" brought to development, and Harrogate business graduates never let it go because the false cost savings are too attractive on paper.
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Wednesday 3rd December 2025 08:48 GMT Lee D
Re: See also XYZ..
Always been the case.
Though, to be absolutely fair, the licences permit that. So it's hard to say that the companies are doing anything wrong.
It's like putting out a sign that says "Help yourself! No charge!" and then getting annoyed that people just take things you put out there and ignore the little honesty-box that you put out there next to it.
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Wednesday 3rd December 2025 17:46 GMT that one in the corner
Re: See also XYZ..
Those same people ignoring the honesty box are also leaving rude notes, telling everyone your free cakes aren't any good because they don't come in a range of pretty boxes and aren't as tasty as the one you get in Harrods - and why didn't you put out enough for all 170 guests at their daughter's wedding like they demanded in yesterday's rude note?
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Tuesday 2nd December 2025 11:43 GMT MashedPotato
Womp Womp
Womp Womp. So much of the rot on Github exists purely for the aggrandisement of the ego of the person who decided to fork. Hey, I'm not going to add to an existing repo, I'm going to invent my own version. Which will eventually die because I get bored. We don't need a million versions of video encoders, we just need one, so don't invent a new one for your onanism.
Womp Womp. If you want software, pay for it. If you don't want to pay then don't be surprised when the hobbyist gets a life.
Womp Womp. Either put up or shut up. If you care so much, become a maintainer. Become part of the solution instead of a malingering guttersnipe.
Womp Womp.
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Tuesday 2nd December 2025 15:21 GMT that one in the corner
Re: Womp Womp
> .So much of the rot on Github exists purely for the aggrandisement of the ego of the person who decided to fork. Hey, I'm not going to add to an existing repo, I'm going to invent my own version.
Um, you do know how Github works, don't you? Or any project in any other (distributed) version-controlled system?
Hmm, looks like you probably don't, so there goes: if you have an idea for an interesting/useful change to an existing repo, you fork it, use that fork to make your changes (which involves lots of commits - all the careful stages in your dev, your new test cases, fixes to your fixes to your new functionality). Then you sync up with whatever changed in the original in the meantime and finally send the existing repo a pull request. They spot a couple more things to tweak. You go around the cycle in your fork. Repeat until the original guys are happy and pull your changes in.
Ta-da, you have just "added to an existing repo".
And have, necessarily, got a.n.other forked copy of that project sitting on Github. Rinse and repeat for all the people who have made contributions.
Sure, there are people who never get around to the final pull request stage. Of course there are. But at least they tried.
And there are plenty of people who fork with the belief they'll create something so different it warrants a new name. Many of which just peter out. But at least they tried.
Plus all the students who are, you know, learning by seeing if they able to make functional changes to a working codebase.
> We don't need a million versions of video encoders, we just need one, so don't invent a new one for your onanism.
Leaving aside all if the above, and more, if you *seriously* believe things like "we can get by with just ONE video encoder that will handle *all* use cases, past, present and future", then you know a lot more about onanism than you do tech and probably ought to stick to what you are good at.
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Wednesday 3rd December 2025 17:51 GMT that one in the corner
Re: Womp Womp
The "worrying the original might be deleted" is prevalent, making sure that you and your user's will always be able to fulfill the dependencies. That is quite sensible, really.
As for just forking to get it under your name to pad the CV: if someone does that and the employer doesn't even care that none of the clones have any real commits in them? They deserve each other!
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Tuesday 2nd December 2025 12:28 GMT steelpillow
The nice thing about open source
is that if a project dies, either its functionality is not useful and got what it deserved, or a community desperate to keep that functionality will rescue/fork/replace it as they see fit. User communities who are too mean to smooth over any hiccups in the transition deserve what they get.
The Ingress NGINX user community have been warned.
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Tuesday 2nd December 2025 12:55 GMT Anonymous Coward
If you're going to shut something like this down, what have you to lose by putting up the paywall for support and fixes? Make the price worthwhile to you, to make a living, and set a lower limit for paid support to be maintained. If they pay, then great, if they don't then the software was evidently not as important to them as they made out.
Those people that won't pay can transition off somewhere else.
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Tuesday 2nd December 2025 15:43 GMT that one in the corner
> what have you to lose by putting up the paywall for support and fixes?
Your time, your energy and, given the jurisdiction this is likely to be in, your house and livelihood.
The guys and gals who are doing the maintenance are programmers who are already overstretched (that is the basic problem). Just to set up the tech mechanisms for a paywall may be something they've no experience in, so have to put time & effort into learning that (without any guarantee that the effort will have any payback; at least you can see your code working as soon as it is done). Then they are suddenly faced with all the brand new legal questions: are they now in any form of contract, having accepted the money? To whom and for what? What is their new tax situation? Have they missed something in setting this up? Do they need an accountant for this? Insurance? If some dev is done behind this paywall, does it stay forever behind it? Does the software licence even allow that to be feasible?
Are their new legal responsibilities going to clash with their current employment?
"But all those things are the natural habitat of a foundation and there are lots of software foundations around, it can't be that hard".
Great. But if one of those foundations wanted to take on this project they've had the chance to do so. And the "community" of freeloaders^^^^^^^^^^users who are complaining now have had all the time to help with that as well as all the time they've devoted to helping develop the codebase.
Unless... Are you going to leap into the breach and provide the devs with all the necessary to manage this simple paywall?
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Tuesday 2nd December 2025 16:37 GMT Anonymous Coward
Good points well made and not considered by myself (the original AC).
Some Devs work off donations. Even if they did that and set a donation goal for the next release. I'm just coming up with ideas, which is how the world works. I've never been a details person, you can do that bit ;-).
The fact is they clearly stated in the article that the Devs need to make a living, so that is but one way of them doing that with what they have. I'm sure there are solutions out there ready made for paywalling, and if you're making enough in donations then an accountant is easy enough to employ. There are also boiler plate licence templates, and you can quite clearly state that you pay and you get updates, or you don't and you won't. You can also waive any rights to warranty, which I assume is what is already happening with the licence they have now.
There is an opportunity here, but let's face it, it's probably more about them not having the time after their real jobs. Which is fair enough.
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Tuesday 2nd December 2025 18:55 GMT Anonymous Coward
Uh, no. These are *people* not companies. Your solution is something a company has time for. Coincidentally (not) the companies doing this *could* offer to pay for the developer's time, or contribute time from their own team. That would be the responsible thing to do.
But companies are not people, they are inherently sociopathic, and short term profit detectives make them cannibalistic as well. It's simply not sustainable.
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Tuesday 2nd December 2025 12:58 GMT Greybearded old scrote
Interesting thought
D. Richard Hipp manages to run a viable business by getting sponsored to work on public domain SQLite. Just as well, since you'll be hard put to find a computer that does anything useful without it these days. Most won't even boot up.
I wonder how he can where others can't?
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Tuesday 2nd December 2025 13:12 GMT cdegroot
Re: Interesting thought
There are in the order of 10E12 SQLite databases on the planeet. There's a large addressable market for support jobs, I'd say.
Not with a relatively niche product like anything Kuberbetes, used by corporations and cloud providers.
But yes, they need to figure things out. Good for the NGinx Ingress maintainers. The hardest and most important part of maintaining Open Source is saying "No" .
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Tuesday 2nd December 2025 13:58 GMT Doctor Syntax
"The CNCF ecosystem"
CNCF: Cloud Native Computing Foundation
It lists a lot a members, including gold and platinum membership. This means solid money being paid in by companies that need it to work and/or want their names up there as Good Guys. It advertises coursed and certifications which probably bring in more money. At least on the face of it there appears to be a route in for money which could be spent to support the work at the coal face.
So where does that money go? Big conferences? PR? Project director salaries? Developers working on the projects?
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Tuesday 2nd December 2025 14:02 GMT heyrick
If we don't, you can kiss the open source free ride goodbye
I doubt this, because some people like to scratch personal itches, some people like to contribute to an open system that isn't controlled and abused by a megacorp, and some people enjoy the intellectual challenge.
What might change is if a pile of bug/security reports (probably found by an AI) arrive, the response will be "pay up or piss off", and in the absence of money the problems will be dealt with when the unpaid maintainer doing this in their free time is good and ready to do it. The end of the free ride will be no longer expecting instant fixes instantly. And if entitled people scream on social media, then the maintainers will simply stop interacting.
They owe us nothing, they're doing this because they choose to. Don't be a dick.
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Tuesday 2nd December 2025 15:52 GMT that one in the corner
Then one goes over and reads that linked to Reddit thread and sees the number of upvotes the OP got at the start, even though he is excoriated later on: want to bet the "profitable businesses and wealthy corporations" are the ones who upvoted (and didn't bother to read any more of the page!)?
I do not in any way disagree with you, but the word "ought" is feeling very strained at the moment.
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Tuesday 2nd December 2025 21:07 GMT Excused Boots
"Then one goes over and reads that linked to Reddit thread and sees the number of upvotes the OP got at the start, even though he is excoriated later on: .....,”
Alas, just a way of life, happens on Reddit, happens on here, happens on every single forum in the world which allows upvotes or downvotes; people tend to read a post and knee-jerk upvote or downvote depending on what they wish was true, or want to be true; often without bothering to understand the actual situation.
So in this particular Reddit post, imagine someone not fully conversant with how this works in the real world? They read ‘blah..blah..blah.. support being pulled without notice...blah..blah..blah....dreadful, how dear they...blah...blah...blah.
Which if you don’t know anything about Open Source, does, on the face of it sound reasonable. Same as if Microsoft suddenly decided that, say Windows 11 was going out of support tomorrow, because we’re all in of AI now and Windows is so yesterday - tough!
Most people or commentators won’t know the difference and will pile in with upvotes or downvotes accordingly. But these things do tend to sort themselves out given a bit of time; as you say the OP was excoriated later on.
Personally, I try to read the entire thread first, ask myself, ‘do I fully understand the arguments being made here’? And only then will I upvote (I very. vary rarely downvote) a post. I try to engage brain before knee-jerk voting.
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Tuesday 2nd December 2025 19:32 GMT hoola
I suspect the wider issue is that by making these contributions all sorts of contractual obligations start to creep in.
Finance and procurement want contracts to manage and use to make payments.
The resulting software or service now has to be legally supported with all sorts of protection for the maintainers and any other staff.
Then add in the usual problem that if one organisation puts in a large enough amount they believe they have more rights and ownership.
FOSS has now left that project.
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Thursday 4th December 2025 10:08 GMT kmorwath
Corporares support FOSS project they need, and only that, while still exploiting a large opportunity of free labour. So they can lower investments and increase profits.
The fact that many FOSS project are changing course shows that FOSS can't work but for few projects heavily subsidized by other businesses and interess, just like Linux paid by data hoarding, moslty.
Just look at what has just happened with MinIO - the "community" version is dead too....
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Tuesday 2nd December 2025 16:02 GMT loud raspberry
Provide a fix with the bug report
I don't understand why this continues to be a persistent problem.
Corporations putting a lot of effort into finding a bug should be encouraged to provide a pull request with a suggested fix and tests. The source and treats software is usually available for scrutiny on GitHub or similar.
I guess the issue for a corporation will be commercial /legal. Maybe the open source community could provide a standard licence under which the big fix and associated tests could be provided an/ord tested by another corporation without attracting a liability or obligation for the corporation(s) involved.
I am of course, presuming an in-ones-spare time maintainer would be happy to review a pull request. More so if it has also been checked out by another corporate user before being promoted. Maybe the maintainers' policy on that could be addressed via the GitHub README.md.
I must be missing something.
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Tuesday 2nd December 2025 21:32 GMT Doctor Syntax
Re: Provide a fix with the bug report
"Maybe the open source community could provide a standard licence under which the big fix and associated tests could be provided an/ord tested by another corporation without attracting a liability or obligation for the corporation(s) involved."
You mean something like one of the GPLs, or MITS, or Apache, or even one of the BSDs?
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Tuesday 2nd December 2025 18:12 GMT kmorwath
Another example that open souice is a flawed model...
If you don't have big corporation paying a little to avoid to have to buy liceneses or develop the software themselves full-scale - as it happens for Linux (and even RedHat was sold...) - there is no way open source can work. Most people will just use the software paying nothing, that after all is the only reason open source was "successful". Very few cared about "freedom" and "source code". Just like any religion built on wishful thinking, most "followers" come just for their own gain.
More and more projects are changing licenses or taking away features from the "free" versions - and I fully understand them.
And while more and more old programmers with decently paid jobs retired, or have less time to dedicate to work for nothing, younger one are evidently not so keen on working for nothing - afert all since sneakers too became a luxuty goods money have to come from somewhere.
If open source eventuall dies, the better. It brought IT back thirty-forty years. Maybe we'll see again more competition and better products, since people will have to pay for them.
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Wednesday 3rd December 2025 05:52 GMT heyrick
Re: Another example that open souice is a flawed model...
Your last sentence...
I shall just gesture vaguely towards the continued enshittification of Windows, and corporations stuffing AI into everything regardless of whether or not it is wanted or even makes sense, and Google's efforts to lock down Android and even to try to control what you can and cannot do with your own device, plus the increasing amount of telemetry because now it is technically possible...
...and you're delusional enough to think that closed source commercial products will be somehow "better"?
They could be "better" irrespective of open source, yet more people are choosing to leave because often what is better for the corporation is very much not better for the users.
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Thursday 4th December 2025 12:01 GMT Michael Strorm
Re: Another example that open souice is a flawed model...
You're projecting your own zealotry regarding strawman stereotype "Stallman worshippers" onto those disagreeing with you. You were given some quite reasinably-argued rebuttals.
Open source has it's problems too, but saying "Maybe we'll see again more competition" is delusional blame-shifting considering that the proprietary Microsoft had an exploitative near-monopoly on the desktop market for decades and still does to a large extent.
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Thursday 4th December 2025 18:04 GMT heyrick
Re: Another example that open souice is a flawed model...
HARD downvote, enough to bust the table and crack the floor tile below, that hard.
I think Stallman is a bit of a dick...so I'm about as far from a Stallman kool-aid drinker as you're liable to find who actually knows who you mean by saying that.
And, yet, earlier in the year I ditched Windows for Linux.
It hasn't been an entirely smooth experience - my inner nerd finds it amusing that streaming encrypted HD video (Netflix) in a browser works fine, but the sound (even playing a local MP3) just randomly stops working. Of all the things you'd think wouldn't be that hard to do, banging data to a DAC ought not be challenging, but then it's some weird Intel crap that needs its own firmware. <shrug>
Asides from that, my thoughts on Linux have been - let's be brutally honest here - overwhelmingly positive. It is more stable, it takes a hell of a lot less space (this machine has a 32GB SSD soldered to the motherboard, so this sort of thing matters), it is notably faster than Windows 10, and I can just "get shit done". Competent web browser with plenty of add-ons to stop the modern-web dross? Installed. A way to tweak and edit my music? Installed. And deal with the ID3 tags? Installed. A somewhat confusing but powerful photo editor? Installed. A text editor? Installed. A way to play videos? Three different ones installed. A full office suite? Installed. A little VNC viewer to allow me to do something on my older machine? Installed. A way to look up at the night sky from exactly where I am and know what that white dot up there is? Installed. And a bunch of other random things like a taskbar streaming radio player, a weather report, a right-click to easily convert PNGs to JPEGs or whatever. And so on, and so forth.
And you know what? All of it was free, both in terms of cost and availability of source code. So from my perspective, what seems quite clear to me is that FOSS and the Linux community have pulled together to make something better than the longstanding incumbent commercial offering. Having now, at long last, used and experienced Linux (Mint Cinnamon, to be precise) for a few months, I don't see any reason to go back to Windows. In fact, I'm sort of low-key wondering why it took this long for me to get around to making the leap.
It's nothing to do with believing in Stallman or the GPL or whatever. It's everything to do with the continual enshittification of Windows, the intentional erosion of privacy, and the continuing efforts being taken to make you - the owner - no longer in control of the device you paid for "for your own good".
Or, you know, download a rather large file, burn it to a spare USB stick, boot it, and see that there is an alternative. Better yet, with a "Live boot" you can check it actually does work correctly on your machine before doing the sensible thing and nuking Windows.
Icon, because guess what I'm using to write this?
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Thursday 4th December 2025 10:06 GMT kmorwath
Re: Another example that open souice is a flawed model...
Windows is almost given away for free because of lack of competition. If they had to compete for users' money they would have to deliver better prodcuts. That's true for Android as well.
Closed source software IS always better than open source one, for the simple reason that people have to pay for it, and they don't pay for bad software. When it's free, bad software start to look okey-ish
Linux itslef is a bad copy of an outdated OS, it exists only becaue university students believed Unix was a divinity.
But free software kills competition, and that's a powerful driver for companies that aims to monopolies. It's funny that open source allowed the raise of large momopolistic compaines like Google. Startup have little chance to grow selling their products when people do expect not to pay for them. So the path became to be bought by one of the big monopolies, that grow larger and ensure compeition can't arise.
Just they had to brainwash people into believing open source was good for them, not Google & C. And looking at comments here, they are succcesfu. There's nothing bettere than a religion to brainwash people.
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Friday 5th December 2025 20:20 GMT Michael Strorm
Re: Another example that open souice is a flawed model...
You're not just drinking the Kool-Aid, you're drowing in a swimming pool of it.
> "Linux itslef is a bad copy of an outdated OS"
You mean like MS-DOS, which was little more than a 16-bit workalike/ripoff of CP/M- itself an operating system itself inspired by Unix, but with far more primitive architecture designed around the limitations of incredibly basic mid-1970s 8-bit microcomputers?
The same MS-DOS that needlessly propagated the limitations of that 8-bit, several-years-old OS on far more powerful hardware capable of running better alternatives, which required messy, Heath Robinson-esque retrofitted workarounds to take advantage of newer hardware and forced users- via MS's near-monopoly- to pointlessly suffer from that early decision for around two decades through- and including- all mainstream versions of Windows prior to XP?
Something that happened at a time when there was no semblance of a viable open source competitor?
> "It's funny that open source allowed the raise of large momopolistic compaines like Google."
You mean like Microsoft was- and still is to a significant extent- in the desktop market with MS-DOS and Windows. Oh hang on, I already mentioned that one, didn't I?
Hey, do you remember when MS exploited its near-monopoly and privileged position to kill off competition in the browser market and how Internet Explorer stagnated- and held back web design- for the better part of a decade until Firefox came along and provided some worthwhile competition.
By which point IE was still established and the need to retain compatibility with existing installations and to deal with its shitty, nonstandard design held back web design for many more years anyway?
And how those fuckers at MS later whined about the fact that they were still having to retain browser compatibility with older sites and systems. You know, systems designed around the shitty, nonstandard aspects of Internet Explorer that *they* used their monopoly at the time to have everyone use?
But do go on to explain how the nonexistent (at the time) open source competition was somehow to blame for MS-DOS, Windows and Internet Explorer.
Hang on, the ambulance just arrived to help pump the Kool-Aid out of your lungs...
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Wednesday 3rd December 2025 06:57 GMT Bebu sa Ware
Re: Another example that open souice is a flawed model...
"If open source eventuall dies"
There is a risk of conflating FOSS with open source software generally.
I personally don't believe FOSS is in any immediate danger of falling off the perch.
The value of open source software to customers versus closed source will always be an important consideration in choosing a product will likely lead to more businesses selling their software licenses with open source.
There has always been closed source software at no·cost to use/license for personal and/or educational use.
Ultimately it is a self correcting problem—if you use an unmaintained FOSS product to make a buck and that product requires urgent maintenance, you will have to find a substitute or arrange the rectification of the FOSS product (which, depending on the license, might oblige you to make available at a minimum to your customers.)
I suspect in the longer term there will be fewer people writing code (not because of AI either) so fewer programmers to donate to FOSS. Scientists and researchers have always (long before the internet) contributed their programs and libraries to their community and don't imagine that is likely to change. I would guess a lot of the code used in AI/LLM originated from such ML researchers.
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Tuesday 2nd December 2025 20:05 GMT Excused Boots
"If open source eventuall dies, the better. It brought IT back thirty-forty years”
I’m afraid that this comment will result in downvotes piling in, and I can understand why. But, you certainly make a good point in the earlier part of your comments. FOSS enthusiasts do push the ‘freedom’ and ‘source code’ and ‘not being beholden to $LARGECORP’ for bug fixes and feature updates as advantages; and they are quite right.
Alas this all means little or nothing to most end users, and especially corporates, their eyes glaze over, until you happen to mention ‘free’ and then they’ll take interest!
But the old adage of ‘no such thing as a free lunch’ does spring to mind!
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Tuesday 2nd December 2025 20:46 GMT rtpHarry
Let it fail
Let it fail. When the costs of replacing stuff become greater then chipping in and less than writing it themselves and ecosystem will find it's natural and correct balance. It won't be the altruism of a random developer to push for the policy it will be the responsibility of an employee to ensure stability is ensured by contributing. It won't happen without the corps feeling some pain though.
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Wednesday 3rd December 2025 10:28 GMT Northern Lad
Payment
The product may be open source/free but companies should be forced, by law, to pay a minimum fee at least on a minimum of a yearly basis. How much that would be I have no idea.
This payment would pay the maintainers, probably making some of them wealthy, and increasing the amount of taxes they pay, making governments happy.
Of course companies will say that this cost will have be passed on to consumers for what ever product they make, but they do this anyway. Got to keep the shareholders happier than the consumer, who if the product was cheaper may buy more of the product thus increasing profits.
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Wednesday 3rd December 2025 18:07 GMT that one in the corner
Re: Payment
> companies should be forced, by law, to...
In too many places, the companies own the law.
So what we'll get instead is:
>> companies will force, by law, the OSS authors to provide the fixes for free; if they don't, they'll be imprisoned which, in certain jurisdictions, means they can now be made to work for free. And it will serve them right, they are just common criminals after all.
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Wednesday 3rd December 2025 13:00 GMT RedGreen925
Exactly time for the parasite corporations to pay for the programs that make them billions of dollars. And it is well past time for a change in the licensing to reflect this people get to use it for free corporations pay for it or do your own programming to get what you need, the free ride is over.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
