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Comment by KGunnerud | Hacker News Reader

Another step into ensh*ttification? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T4Upf_B9RLQ

It's becoming clearer and clearer that open-source is our only hope against enshittification. Everything that is VC backed or publicly traded will become enshittified, it's just a matter of time. At least with open-source, you can fork it and remove the "features" or point your agent to it and have it write the feature in your tech stack.

Hell, I just saw an amazing open-source alternative to Raycast[0] and just replaced it the other day.

0. https://github.com/ospfranco/sol

> open-source is our only hope against enshittification. Everything that is VC backed or publicly traded will become enshittified

Solo founder here. My business is not VC-backed nor publicly traded, and I specifically avoided taking investment so that I can make all the decisions.

I avoid enshittification. This sometimes hurts revenue, but so be it. I wouldn't want to subject my users to anything I wouldn't like.

So, open-source is not the only hope. You can run a sustainable business without enshittification. The problem is money people. The moment money people (career managers, CFOs, etc) take over from product people, the business is on a downward path towards enshittification.

I believe you, it's just I've seen similar stories and the good-intentioned founder gets tired and eventually sells the business and the new owner ends up enshittifying the product. Not saying in the slightest it will happen to your company and I don't hold that against the founder. It's their prerogative after all.

Even when I use proprietary software, I sleep easier at night knowing that open-source alternatives keep them honest in their approach and I have an out if things do change.

> It's becoming clearer and clearer that open-source is our only hope against enshittification. Everything that is VC backed or publicly traded will become enshittified, it's just a matter of time.

Stallman was always right, after all.

Well, about the free-software part, anyway.

public/legislative demand for data portability is imho the movement that will help shift society from this cycle

edit: oh, that and distributed authentication and distributed discovery

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