How the development world changes (enshittification)

You probably didn’t hear that the foundation behind the Zig programming language decided to switch from github to codeberg, and I will not try to explain to you why this is an important piece of news. It’s not. It’s a sane choice, and not only that, it’s the choice that should be and is made by some other open source projects as well. The article in The Register that I linked to gives one reason. It’s not the only one, but a common trend we tend to see in the development world, even at tooling level (and this is new).

Microsoft, for example, is notorious for being developer-friendly. It’s impossible not to remember the desperate yells of Mr. Ballmer „Developers developers developers developers”. Microsoft knew that if they conquered that side of the conversation, they will win every battle. But 20 years the battle seems lost - everyone switched to Linux and Macs, and no more developers developers developers developers for Microsoft? Yet, they make the most popular editor (Visual Studio Code) and they own the most popular platform for hosting code, github. And what do they do with it? „Embrace AI or get out”. And github embraced AI.

Now, this is not the „railing on AI” post. Not yet. It’s the „we own a product and we make it worse because it has to serve our commercial purposes rather than the initial intended purpose” rant. Because that’s what is happening everywhere in the world.

I haven’t seen too much tech that got better in the past years. I can say that Fedora is now finally a distribution that works properly, and Steam does things right, but aside that? Close to nothing. Every commercial offering got worse - and almost every piece of software that is under a corporate umbrella got significantly worse, with almost no exceptions. The process looks and feels intentional, and it is, it’s what Cory Doctorow noticed and named in a number of essays. Products that used to work and gained users, turned against their users for commercial exploitation. It’s when you see corporations sticking ads or tracking in their products, or pulling out what looks like a „forever” offering and relicensing it under different terms. Dark patterns and practices that aim to keep you locked to a platform, paying money to the one who owns it or making money for that person.

Of course, it’s not the programmers who do this, but the marketing and sales office of the people who hire the programmers. And this is where open source used to come in. There was a time when we knew that commercial offerings are not only costly in up-front money, but in long term dependency on the vendor. Open source was meant as a counter-balance to commercial offering, and it was for a while, until…

Well, until the commercial offices saw that they couldn’t compete on price with 0-cost offerings, unless they offered what they do for free. On paper, this meant a boom of high-quality tools being offered for free. In practice, it meant that more users were exposed and locked in using some tools that they cannot abandon anymore. That’s why github is basically free: it locks people in the platform by making everyone depend on github-specific tooling, and then… Then they exploit that market.

And it’s very hard to see the cost of something that is free. People rarely see the cost of commercial products, seeing the cost of something that is free is impossible for most. I had an immeasurable number of people explaining me that I should switch to Apple products (which are anything but free) because they offer the most comfortable lock-in; it’s impossible to bring the „cost” aspect into discussion when using free tools like github.

So people lock themselves-in voluntarily. It’s free, and will always be. And Whatsapp will always be free. Facebook too! Twitter, free (we saw how that went). Everything for free.

These days I was thinking about the rustification of everything, and what’s the point. And I realized, with the move of zig, that the rust people will never leave Microsoft. Perhaps because they are industry plants to keep people on corporate platforms, and the rewrite effort is a new devious way to lock people into the corporate platforms. I don’t know. Perhaps that’s the case, and this is why this smells like dead matter since the moment I saw „the revolution” happen. Anyway, to bring this rant to a conclusion, expect your software to be plagued by corporations and enshittified, forever, until the end of time.