Published October 30 2025 on MentalNet.xyz
Every few months, someone declares that open source is dying. They point to burnout, unpaid maintainers, or corporate interference. But listen closer — what they really mean is, “I wish open source would stop making me feel responsible.” Because true openness forces participation, and participation means accountability.
Most of these critics don’t hate open source — they just want it to behave like a product. They want Linux to be a frictionless, pretty front end for their gaming rigs. They want a distro that never asks them a question. They want freedom without understanding.
But open source was never about comfort. It’s about curiosity, discovery, and sometimes chaos. That’s where the real magic happens — not in polished GUIs, but in that moment when you break something, stare at the logs, and realize you actually get it now.
The Flatpak era symbolizes something deeper — a shift from curiosity to avoidance. Developers say “it’s not our job to package for Debian,” and users applaud because they think it means less work. But every layer of abstraction is also a layer of lost understanding. You don’t solve problems anymore — you containerize them.
Reading logs, tracing dependencies, debugging services — those used to be rites of passage. Now they’re treated as eccentric hobbies. The person who still reads man pages is the odd one out, even though they’re the one keeping the system alive.
Projects that make those tasks easier — like tools that help you build .deb packages or visualize dependencies — get labeled as “overkill.” But they’re not. They’re bridges between developers and maintainers. They make creation more transparent. And transparency, in computing, is freedom.
A small act of curiosity can ripple across projects. When I was experimenting with OpenBSD in a VM, I noticed that oh-my-bash’s alias formkdir -pvdidn’t work, because BSD’smkdirdoesn’t support-v. I reported it in Issue #351, and maintainer @akinomyoga implemented a smarter, cross-platform detection function that checks for-vbefore applying the alias. That single change turned a failing command into a robust, portable one — and now the project cites that issue as part of its ongoing work to keep BSD compatibility intact. Moments like that show what open source is really about: not grand rewrites or flashy announcements, but dozens of quiet, thoughtful fixes that make the ecosystem stronger.
This split starts long before anyone touches production code. It starts in high school.
One kid decides to major in computer science because it’s a “stable, well-paying job.” They hear about frameworks, APIs, and tech stacks. It all sounds safe, predictable, structured.
The other kid finds an old laptop with a broken hard drive. They have no money. So they grab a USB stick, download a Linux ISO, and boot into a live system. That’s how they learn. When the bootloader fails, they learn what GRUB is. When the installer can’t see the drive, they learn about partitions. They don’t study computing — they live it.
And that difference never fades. The first person learns to depend on platforms. The second learns to depend on themselves. One panics when something breaks; the other leans in and says, “Okay, let’s see what happened.” That’s the essence of the open-source spirit — curiosity in the face of chaos.
There’s something spiritual about coding in that “trance” — when you’re just you and the machine, iterating, testing, feeling your way forward. It’s like a conversation between two minds, one silicon and one human. Mistakes don’t feel like failures; they’re just feedback. You stop fearing them and start learning from them.
People who only work within pre-defined frameworks will never understand that flow. They see it as messy, unstructured, inefficient. But that’s how discovery works. Real breakthroughs rarely come from polished corporate environments — they come from experimentation, from intuition, from those long nights where something finally clicks because you stopped overthinking and started building.
People love to say “freedom dies in darkness,” but in the open-source world, that’s exactly where it lives. It’s in the basements, the IRC servers still humming at 2 a.m., the Git repos maintained by one dedicated person who just loves making things work. It’s in the communities that don’t care about hype — only about code that runs clean and honest.
Freedom doesn’t need a marketing department. It doesn’t need polish. It just needs people willing to keep learning when everyone else decides it’s not worth the effort.
So when someone says open source is dying, they’re really just admitting they’ve stopped looking for it. It’s not dead — it’s underground, alive, and whispering to those who still care enough to listen.
That’s where the real hackers live — not in boardrooms, not in app stores, but in that quiet, flickering glow of a terminal screen. And that’s where freedom still burns.