I know this article is a few years old but I just came across it today while searching for a nix lsp. I thought it might be an interesting issue to discuss as I don’t think much progress has been made in this space (or maybe there has and I’m living under a rock?).
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Before you complain that this is an old article, read the post body!
Very cool article but mainly because I was bracing for more nonsense about how stripped down apps can help “dopamine fasting” - which like paranoia about antivirus or mugging level threats has completely overtaken many otherwise terrific projects and leads people to do insane things like destroy searching public posts on one’s own website to provide people a security blanket
Instead this gets to one of the core problems with open source. Let’s dig even deeper. Most open source contributors are depressed knowing they serve an industry dominated by imperialists who care nothing for them and will actively warp communities into digital company towns, instigate new forms of bullying and low grade civil conflict, and open source development is basically a coping mechanism that can sometimes serve as a justification to stay in the industry
I mean there’s a reason why big tech love open source, and why they run smear campaigns against the GPL and AGPL. They don’t want collaboration on software, they just want free stuff.
You could develop something very useful just as a hobby and next thing you know you’re free engineering resources for Amazon. However, I don’t think that is the only reason for mental health breakdown. Redox OS isn’t a project of commercial interest at the moment (it may be if something crazy happens with Linux or it beats the BSDs), yet it is the source of this article. There are likely other factors at play. I think the least contributors and users of OSS can do is just be nice to people. I had this crazy argument on here over the wording of the Ventoy BLOB issue where people were trying to say that it’s acceptable just to insult people you don’t even know who are developing a project in the open for you to use for free.
tl;dr: Volunteers should be treated with absolute respect, I think open source is taken too seriously.
side-tracking
Out of the 800,000 people each year who committed suicide, on average perhaps more capable than the rest of us, what if a few would have been instrumental in developing fusion power?
I don’t like arguments like this. Especially when it comes from someone in the tech field. It seems to imply that climate change is a technical problem and that some silver bullet solution from a savant will solve it. Meanwhile in the real world, the economic and political system has been blowing all the increasing energy capacity on useless stuff like cryptocurrency and now AI.
