alt Hacker NewsOpen source has three main purposes, in decreasing order of importance:
1) Ensuring that there is no malicious code and enabling you to build it yourself.
2) Making modifications for yourself (Stallman's printer is the famous example).
3) Using other people's code in your own projects.
Item 3) is wildly over-propagandized as the sole reason for open source. Hard forks have traditionally led to massive flame wars.
We are now being told by corporations and their "AI" shills that we should diligently publish everything for free so the IP thieves can profit more easily. There is no reason to oblige them. Hiding test suites in order to make translations more difficult is a great first step.
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I think the only non-slop parts of the web are: open source, wikipedia, arXiv, some game worlds and social network comments in well behaved/moderated communities. What do they share in common? They all allow building on top, they are social first, people come together for interaction and collaboration.
The rest is enshittified web, focused on attention grabbing, retention dark patterns and misinformation. They all exist to make a profit off our backs.
A pattern I see is that we moved on from passive consumption and now want interactivity, sociality and reuse. We like to create together.
> Hard forks have traditionally led to massive flame wars.
Provided that the project is popular and has a community, especially a contributor community (the two don't have to go together.) Most projects aren't that prominent.