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.

      • maplebar@lemmy.world
        0·
        2 months ago

        What is Ubuntu doing to enshittify that can’t be fixed or mitigated by source modifications or forks?

        • fuckwit_mcbumcrumble@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
          0·
          2 months ago

          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.

    • Ephera@lemmy.mlEnglish
      0·
      2 months ago

      Android, Chromium.

      The problem is that:

      1. Google puts in more development power than anyone else. Any forks we’ve seen so far are only really soft forks, as in they only apply a few patches on top of what Google puts out, rather than taking the project in a new direction, because you’d be behind pretty quickly.
      2. These projects establish platforms that have shitty decisions baked in. For example, the Android dev tooling has Google ads/tracking as one of the built-in UI components, which is why even if you patch the OS, the apps will still be shitty. To actually change this stuff, you’d need a majority of users to switch to your fork and stay there for a few years.
      3. Partially, it’s only financially viable for Google to develop these projects, because they have those Android ads or benefit from a web with less tracking protection. This makes it extremely unlikely for any other organization to be able to splurge a similar amount of money, which brings us back to a fork just being unlikely.

      And so long as a fork is unlikely, Google can do shitfuckery quite similar to proprietary projects.

    • krash@lemmy.ml
      0·
      2 months ago

      My two examples are of OS SaaS that got their plug pulled before they got to that stage. See skiff.com and omnivore.

      • maplebar@lemmy.world
        0·
        2 months ago

        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?