alt Hacker Newsyes it does, but this kind of abuse is also inherent in the system we have built
I remember fondly the time when computing was build on common interfaces and open formats. A abusive software supplier would be fired and replaced.
Now we have closed platforms and enshitification.
Replies
> abusive software supplier would be fired and replaced.
Rose colored glasses much? We've never had the environment you're describing.
Do you recall the 00's and '10s? It was cluttered with closed systems that had ridiculously high costs to move away from. Look at Oracle, or 15-20 year dominance of MS Outlook and Exchange that was so difficult for many customers to deal with it forced the creation of the hosted exchange business model. Heck, go back another decade and look at Novell and WordPerfect.
We've always had closed platforms, and we've always had alternatives. Some businesses choose between them based on priorities that don't align with yours...
This is why generative AI is great imho, it allows us to rapidly replicate capabilities that might experience enshittification without the historical moat of capital for investment in bespoke software engineering time.
Find use case, find stakeholders, wrangle stakeholders, build application with tokens, manage it in a non profit, coop, or similar model. License it in a way that prevents capture by commercial interests. Private equity (or rather, capital driven operating models in general) cannot enshittify what they cannot capture. If models continue to improve, this cycle can accelerate if generating "good code" continues to become more efficient and less resource intensive over time.
TLDR Building an anti-enshittification software factory.
> A abusive software supplier would be fired and replaced.
Oracle has joined the chat :) (and them joining the chat is an additional clause to the initial contract, billed at 300% hourly rate, with a minimum block of 900 man-hours)