from the aka-avoiding-the-enshittification-of-software dept.
Here are two related essays on software freedom in light of the current environment where platform decay has become the norm.
Lead developer of Linux-Libre, FSFLA board member, and previous FSF board member, Alexandre Oliva wrote a piece back in June about platform decay (also known colloquially as enshittification) and how to fight it through software freedom. It's from his May 5th, 2024 LibrePlanet presentation with the same title ( video and slides ). This weekend, developer Daniel Cantarín wrote a follow up addressing the nature of software freedom and the increasing communication, philosophical, and political barriers to actually achieving software freedom.
The two essays are essentially in agreement but raise different points and priorities.
Alexandre Oliva's essay includes the following:
[...] Software (static) enshittification
Back in the time when most users could choose which version of a program they wanted to run, upgrading software was not something that happened automagically. Installing a program involved getting a copy of its installable media, and if you wanted to install a newer version, you had to get a copy of the installable media for the newer version.
You could install them side by side, and if you found that the newer version was lacking some feature important to you, or it didn't serve you well, you could roll back to the older version.
This created a scenario in which the old and the new versions competed for users, so in order for the newer version to gain adoption, it had to be more attractive to users than the older one. It had to offer more interesting features, and if it dropped features or engaged in enshittification, it would need even more interesting features to make up.
This limits how much enshittification can be imposed on users in newer versions. It was much harder to pull feature from under users in that static arrangement.
Software (dynamic) enshittification
But now most users are mistreated with imposed updates, and since they are required to be online all the time, they are vulnerable all the time, and they can't go back to an earlier version that served them well. The following are the most enshittifiable arrangements to offer computing facilities to users. Most enshittifiable so far, Homer Simpson would presumably point out.
Apps that run on remotely-controlled telephones (TRApps) and that are typically automatically updated from exclusive app stores, and their counterparts that run on increasingly enshittified computers (CRApps) are cases in which the programs are installed on your own computer, but are controlled by someone else. They've come to be called apps, so that you'll think of them as appliances rather than as something you can and should be able to tinker with.
Web sites that, every time you visit them, install and demand to run Javascrapped programs on your computer, are a case in which, even if the program is technically Free Software, in this setting, someone else controls which version you get to run, and what that version does.
And then, there are the situations in which, instead of getting a copy of a program, you're offered a service that will do your computing for you, under somebody else's control, substituting software that could have been respectful of your freedom. [...]
And Daniel Cantarín's follow up essay includes the following:
[...] Mr. Oliva tells us that, between enshittified software and free software, the choice is not hard. It’s the very article’s title, and it alone should scandalize anyone with minimal knowledge in the matter between its implicit lack of touch with objective reality and its close distance with hypocrisy, all that in a very light tone that even had the intention of being somehow funny. And this discourse wasn’t even in a divulgation context, with an auditorium strange to free software: it was for LibrePlanet, where most people use free software and knows its history and details. Considering that Mr. Oliva is a public and important figure inside the community, a referent, and also considering that I can very rarely participate in this kind of community events -because I have very little free time-, I immediately asked myself: is this the kind of stuff the community is talking about? Are this the discursive lines our references tell us to follow?
No, Mr. Oliva, I’m afraid you’re deeply mistaken: choosing free software is hard. VERY hard. TOO hard, I dare say. And I have my serious suspicions that our leaders/references and the course of our communities has a lot to do with that. But let’s take a look at this argument by contrasting my context with your article.
The tip of the iceberg
Mr. Oliva tells us about different types of software enshittification in different contexts, both historical and operational. Stuff we all know and hate like forced updates, software stores, remote policying, inability to go back to previous versions, and so on and so on. Please go read the full article, as in this regards is actually fruitful if you don’t know what we’re talking about here. I believe all of Mr. Oliva’s remarks are true: enshittification is a real phenomenon, he’s not the first one to mention it (as he adequately clarifies), and it’s an actual and important issue that we all need to pay attention to. That’s all fine, and the problem with his article of course is not there. The problem is how he talks about it, specially to force his interpretations as if it where some kind of “common sense”. So it’s important to take a look at his arguments.
Let’s begin by this quote: [...]
Rights which we had in the analog world are getting increasingly difficult to carry over into the digital realm. Whether we can or not will depend on software and the protocols and file formats the software rely upon.
Previously:
(2024) Enshittification of Google and the Men Who Killed Search
(2024) Bruce Perens Solicits Comments on First Draft of a Post-Open License
(2024) Cory Doctorow Has a Plan to Wipe Away the Enshittification of Tech
(2023) Enshittification Everywhere. Your Car, Your Phone, Your Tractor, Your Computer...
Related Stories
Companies are willing to make their products less reliable, less attractive, less safe and less resilient in pursuit of rents.
https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/24/rent-to-pwn/
Forget F1: the only car race that matters now is the race to turn your car into a digital extraction machine, a high-speed inkjet printer on wheels, stealing your private data as it picks your pocket. Your car's digital infrastructure is a costly, dangerous nightmare – but for automakers in pursuit of postcapitalist utopia, it's a dream they can't give up on.
[...] Don't drive a cab, create Uber and extract value from every driver and rider. Better still: don't found Uber, invest in Uber options and extract value from the people who invest in Uber. Even better, invest in derivatives of Uber options and extract value from people extracting value from people investing in Uber, who extract value from drivers and riders.
Go meta.
An apocryphal tale regarding the late, great footballer George Best being interviewed by a reporter just after getting suspended from Manchester United offers an apt description of today's tech industry right now.
Best was the finest footballer (or soccer in Freedom Language) of his generation during the Swinging Sixties and was one of the first big-money athletes to transcend sport and achieve celebrity. He was handsome, ferociously talented on the pitch, and famously debauched off it. He was once quoted as saying "I spent a lot of money on booze, birds and fast cars – the rest I just squandered."
According to the tale, the journalist was ushered into his hotel suite – strewn with empty champagne bottles after a wild party. A former Miss United Kingdom was freshening up in the shower and George sat in an armchair with a cigar and a huge glass of Scotch in his fist. The journalist's first question was: "So Bestie, where did it all go wrong?"
The same question can be asked of today's tech industry which, like Best, experienced initial greatness but has arguably wasted the spoils with loutish behavior and cashing in on past achievements.
Attracting customers and then exploiting them is a phenomenon that's as old as capitalism, but it's become endemic in the tech industry where it has earned a new name: "enshittification."
The coiner of the term, author and activist Cory Doctorow, described it thus.
Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.
Bruce Perens is working on licensing for a new, post-Open Source era to take open source licensing past the apparent stalling point it has reached on its way towards software freedom. As he noted earlier, current licenses are not meeting that goal and businesses have either found loophole or just plain been allowed to ignore the licensing. A move more towards a contract is needed.
At the link below is the first draft of the Post-Open License. This is not yet the product of a qualified attorney, and you shouldn't apply it to your own work yet. There isn't context for this license yet, so some things won't make sense: for example the license is administered by an entity called the "POST-OPEN ADMINISTRATION" and I haven't figured out how to structure that organization so that people can trust it. There are probably also terms I can't get away with legally, this awaits work with a lawyer.
Because the license attempts to handle very many problems that have arisen with Open Source licensing, it's big. It's approaching the size of AGPL3, which I guess is a metric for a relatively modern license, since AGPL3 is now 17 years old
The draft license is quite long since it covers quite a few scenarios.
Previously:
(2023) What Comes After Open Source? Bruce Perens is Working on It
(2018) The Next 20 Years of Open Source Software Begins Today
The specific process by which Google enshittified its search (24 Apr 2024)
https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/24/naming-names/#prabhakar-raghavan
All digital businesses have the technical capacity to enshittify: the ability to change the underlying functions of the business from moment to moment and user to user, allowing for the rapid transfer of value between business customers, end users and shareholders:
Which raises an important question: why do companies enshittify at a specific moment, after refraining from enshittifying before? After all, a company always has the potential to benefit by treating its business customers and end users worse, by giving them a worse deal. If you charge more for your product and pay your suppliers less, that leaves more money on the table for your investors.
Of course, it's not that simple. While cheating, price-gouging, and degrading your product can produce gains, these tactics also threaten losses. You might lose customers to a rival, or get punished by a regulator, or face mass resignations from your employees who really believe in your product.
Companies choose not to enshittify their products...until they choose to do so. One theory to explain this is that companies are engaged in a process of continuous assessment, gathering data about their competitive risks, their regulators' mettle, their employees' boldness. When these assessments indicate that the conditions are favorable to enshittification, the CEO walks over to the big "enshittification" lever on the wall and yanks it all the way to MAX.
The Men Who Killed Google Search
https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/
The story begins on February 5th 2019, when Ben Gomes, Google's head of search, had a problem. Jerry Dischler, then the VP and General Manager of Ads at Google, and Shiv Venkataraman, then the VP of Engineering, Search and Ads on Google properties, had called a "code yellow" for search revenue due to, and I quote, "steady weakness in the daily numbers" and a likeliness that it would end the quarter significantly behind.
For those unfamiliar with Google's internal scientology-esque jargon, let me explain. A "code yellow" isn't, as you might think, a crisis of moderate severity. The yellow, according to Steven Levy's tell-all book about Google, refers to — and I promise that I'm not making this up — the color of a tank top that former VP of Engineering Wayne Rosing used to wear during his time at the company. It's essentially the equivalent of DEFCON 1 and activates, as Levy explained, a war room-like situation where workers are pulled from their desks and into a conference room where they tackle the problem as a top priority. Any other projects or concerns are sidelined.
In emails released as part of the Department of Justice's antitrust case against Google, Dischler laid out several contributing factors — search query growth was "significantly behind forecast," the "timing" of revenue launches was significantly behind, and a vague worry that "several advertiser-specific and sector weaknesses" existed in search.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by SomeGuy on Thursday August 15 2024, @01:44AM (3 children)
This is why I still use lots of Windows 9x era software. I don't have to upgrade and it does what I need. A sink hole could open up and pull Microsoft down to hell, the entire internet could disappear, and I could still access my own computer, my own data, and get useful work done.
But how do you make any of this attractive to "normal" people?
It's like they crave violent ass rape, seeking out ways to requre that they get raped constantly, with every corner of their ass hole being documented and published for other ass rapers to enjoy. What the hell?
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Rosco P. Coltrane on Thursday August 15 2024, @03:20AM (1 child)
The problem with that is , it only buys you time. Once of these days a PC will come out that won't boot your favorite OS, or Mozilla will drop support for your favorite OS and eventually the last version will have outdated certs.
Don't think you're free if you get off the upgrade trademill: at some point, you'll have to get back on whether you like it or not. The Microsofts, Googles and Apples of the world know it full well, and that's a lot of the reason why they keep "innovating" at breakneck speed when logic would dictate that monopolies should logically want to milk their existing cash cows that nobody can avoid without spending a penny changing them.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by SomeGuy on Thursday August 15 2024, @12:10PM
believe me, I feel that every damn day. Several major web sites are heavily pushing people to use their smart phone "apps" instead. I don't even own a smartphone. Even more treadmill lock in there. I fully expect them to cripple their web sites in the near future, and very long term web sites may even go away.
The other day I got a spam from Indeed saying "Your job search is easier on the app
Did you know Indeed app users get hired 30% faster than non-app users?*" How do they even manage that unless they have crippled something?
It's so stupid.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Reziac on Friday August 16 2024, @03:22AM
Hell, I use a DOS app from 1991 that's been irreplaceable. My primary work software, also with no reasonable replacement, was last updated in 2005 (but fortunately will run on W95 onward). My daily driver runs XP64 because it doesn't constantly make me want to jerk a UI dev through the monitor and bite his head off. I became annoyed with modern versions of business card software and reverted to Rockford, which was designed for Win3.0, dumb as bricks but did what I wanted without an argument.
Yeah, I feel the pinch sometimes, but it's not enough to make me switch fulltime to the Win11 laptop or even the linux box. Because the chronic annoyances and deficiencies that have been introduced over the years are not worth it.
They way they make anything attractive to ordinary people is by making it the path of least resistance. And if you're not a geek, that's the only path there is. We're outclassed and outnumbered.
Now, everyone off our lawn!
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by lush7 on Thursday August 15 2024, @07:44AM (5 children)
I can not take anyone seriously who uses that word. Vulgarity can be poetic, humorous, and even beautiful. But, that word is clumsy as all hell. lol (I imagine someone trying to say it five times with a bite of muffins in their mouth).
(Score: 2, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 15 2024, @07:57AM
Mentally, then, always translate it to full-of-shit: to-the-point, beautiful, poetic.
(Score: 2, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 15 2024, @11:34AM (1 child)
I can't take anyone seriously who feels compelled to use "Platform Decay" because their snowflake ears are too fragile to have them exposed
to reality
(Score: 2) by Tork on Thursday August 15 2024, @03:50PM
... he typed loudly.
🏳️🌈 Proud Ally 🏳️🌈
(Score: 2) by janrinok on Thursday August 15 2024, @11:40AM
Probably why children are frequently told not to talk with their mouth full - it is considered impolite and makes speech difficult to comprehend :)
[nostyle RIP 06 May 2025]
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Sunday August 18 2024, @12:36AM
Maybe that's half the point. The word itself reflects its meaning.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by bzipitidoo on Thursday August 15 2024, @01:33PM
I do IT work for a small company. Yet the boss farmed out the work of creating and maintaining a website to a service that specializes in that. I admit their knowledge of that domain is greater than mine. However, now the company is stuck. Changing website hosts would be difficult. Even though the site is based on WordPress, which is free software, they have too carefully kept control of the files. We can only make changes through a web based interface that limits what we can do. I asked them for the files in /var/www or wherever they keep the files. Instead, they fobbed me off with slightly greater access through WordPress, and acted as if they had satisfied my request. We can't update anything ourselves, certainly not WordPress to a newer version.
The boss is not a computer expert and does not understand what they've done. Could we port our own domain name, like we could a telephone number? It can be done, but not as easily as a telephone number.
Another example of SaaS like crap is everywhere, in organizational forms. The minions who work for organizations are too tight with their forms. They'll grudgingly give out PDF versions that often cannot be easily filled in electronically, so that the applicant ends up having to print it out and fill it in with handwritten info. When I have asked for the source-- the Word document or whatever they used to make the PDF-- they play stupid, act as if I had asked for a digital version, and give me the PDF again. What's going on is that they see the making of forms as one of their primary job functions, and if they give out that work, they fear their job might no longer be needed and will be eliminated. Sometimes, though, it's management that fights this, fearing that rival businesses will copy and use the forms they made.
What really gets under their skin is going to the trouble of recreating a form from scratch. They don't at all like being shown how easy it is to copy a form in that fashion. The worst ones will be all butthurt and whine that I've somehow violated their rights. Sometimes I get nitpicking, with absurd claims that my reverse engineered copy is somehow unacceptable, even though a printout of it is just fine.
How to change this attitude? Maybe the only way is for customers to make them change, by demanding more digital and more standardized forms.