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Comment by fl4regun

1 day ago

the passion is only gone for the people who are working for a corporation, there's still active development on FOSS software everywhere by hobbyists everywhere. The means are still there too, you can host your own web-server or release apps, as many still do.

Most FOSS is developed dispassionately by corporations who find themselves locked to the project but would rather destroy it if they could.

Linux, for example. Almost all code is from corporations, mainly hardware vendors who want Linux to run on their hardware. If they could sell a proprietary OS to their customers they would abandon Linux in a heartbeat.

  • Luckily, you have the right to fork if you dont like how a FOSS project is being managed.

    Don't like the corporate influence in Linux? Use FreeBSD. Make your own. Whatever you want. The price of freedom is you have to put in the effort to be the change you want to see in the world.

> the passion is only gone for the people who are working for a corporation, there's still active development on FOSS software everywhere by hobbyists everywhere.

Unfortunately, FOSS maintainers pretty much everywhere have been drowning for years. First it was "security researchers" meat-proxying dependabot or people looking to gamify their Github stats by filing spam merge requests for typos in readmes, and now it's "security researchers" running one of the usual AI agent suspects and flooding projects with reports of varying kinds of quality.

For me, the passion is pretty much gone. It's slop everywhere.

> The means are still there too, you can host your own web-server or release apps, as many still do.

Technically you still can. Practically? Without relying on big tech for protection, your small server will be shaken down by DDoS gangs operating from North Korea, and AI-assisted skiddies will exploit any vulnerability in a matter of hours like it happened with log4j, wp2shell, php2shell and a host of other memeable security incidents. Maintaining a server these days is nasty busywork if you don't want to end up with your user data exfil'd to the darknet.

  • > Technically you still can. Practically? Without relying on big tech for protection, your small server will be shaken down by DDoS gangs operating from North Korea, and AI-assisted skiddies will exploit any vulnerability in a matter of hours like it happened with log4j, wp2shell, php2shell and a host of other memeable security incidents. Maintaining a server these days is nasty busywork if you don't want to end up with your user data exfil'd to the darknet.

    You can avoid most of that with a simple static website. Even if you manage the web server and OS yourself. KISS is a lifesaver.

    • > Even if you manage the web server and OS yourself. KISS is a lifesaver.

      That is not enough. Even "simple" web servers can and will be hacked - Apache, haproxy and nginx all have had their fair share. And that's before we get into the Linux kernel itself, see CVE-2026-98432 if you need a recent example.

      It's simply gotten untenable ever since AI entered the picture.

    • Until it turns out your server is vulnerable to something like *sshole which you had no way to know about or defend against without formally verifying the whole OS.