I used to work on various proprietary products for experience, now I’m back to Free and Open Source development to make this world better!

Your support keeps me going ❤️

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⚡Lightning: alopatindev@stacker.news

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FAQ

Why sponsoring independent FOSS developers? What’s wrong with traditional businesses?

Not necessarily “wrong”, just mostly not aligned with my values.

One of the core values I’m pursuing is just distraction minimization: I don’t want to trap users’ attention in my products; they deserve healthier life!

More explanations! 🤯

Why is it so hard to properly express
just this value alone in commercial products?

I perceive the three typical career paths the following way:

1. Work for traditional company (or companies) as a contractor (or coworker)

  • Pros:
    • 👍 possibility to practice SE
      • best for initial gaining of SE experience
    • 👍 possibility to choose organization maturity
      • in a depressing range 🫤
    • 👍 typically no sustainability fuss at all
  • Cons:
    • 🤦‍♂️ (almost) no control over high-level decisions
      • company will likely do some unethical things for various legitimate reasons

2. Work on Personal Projects

  • Pros:
    • 👍 best for those who already experienced enough in SE
    • 👍 full decisions control
      • possibility to express unrestricted ethical values from the very beginning
      • innovations freedom
  • Cons:
    • 💀 extremely hard sustainability

3. Open a traditional company

  • Pros:
    • 👍 some decisions control
      • restricted to democratic decisions across (co-)founders
      • but some of the co-founders might often turn out to be overgrown psychopathic infants 💀
        • what kind of decisions such company will be making in this case?
  • Cons:
    • 🤦‍♂️ too much management, hard to perform actual SE as founder
    • 🤦‍♂️ often very hard sustainability
    • 💀 parasitic survival values for unknown period of time
      • company rarely matures up to advanced enough stages of development, where high enough ethical values become adequate to express (without damaging company sustainability).

Few examples of parasitism in typical commercial products:

  1. Intentional (usually survival) manipulative techniques:
    • intrusive advertising and notifications
      • “We’ve got something else for you!” when user is about to close a page
      • sudden loud commercials while you’re listening to your silent relaxing meditative music
    • sudden appearance of unwanted button in the position you were about to click
    • replacement of normal support service with a retarded chatbot simulacrum, that gives only a limited number of useless feedback options
  2. Hardcore intentional manipulative techniques, which suspiciously remind scam techniques which exist as something legal due to poor regulations:
    • unannounced enabling of useless paid services
    • overcomplicated UIs which intentionally lead to mistakes
    • not providing purchased service at all with absurd excuse.

If I’d like to start a traditional company, then even as an ethical enough founder, I would most likely run into choices between:

  • implementing similar parasitic stuff
  • or closing entire organization, since it’s unlikely it will survive otherwise.

Sustainable organizations
slowly grow through stages of development

They often stuck in endless survival nightmare. Some of them run into conflicts between co-founders, which may lead to corrupting the core values of organization in various ways or, ironically, even abandoning core leaders!

There’s a huge chance to never make anything really ethical as an organization, despite long and painful efforts to grow it.

Ignorance

Organizations naturally delegate less important things to teams which gladly copy-paste terrible damaging ideas, due to various convincing excuses: because they are cheaper to copy, they are implemented by competitors, etc.

  • scrolljacking
  • useless over-detailed documentation, which quickly becomes obsolete
  • sudden non-disableable notifications/tooltips/tutorials/announcements of features
  • useless CAPTCHAs, which bury your precious flow state
    • other than something like DDoS attacks, there’s absolutely no reason to distinguish bots from humans anymore
    • it’s ironical that companies like OpenAI/Google/Cloudflare/etc. are wasting their time improving bot detection
      • they could even monetize bots traffic, by turning bots into a crypto mining farm distributed browser-based ML inference engine, or whatever ecological enough, both to human mentality and to the business
  • overcomplicate every single native GUI application by turning it into another web browser
    • it’s a fractal of issues; one of them is that such software inevitably becomes buggy (and usually laggy)
      • sometimes to the point, where it becomes impossible to use without loss of attention and constant annoyance
  • offline anti-patterns, like a notification bell in your microwave that decreases quality of your neighbors’ sleep
    • reminds me an another popular (but orthogonal) anti-pattern: cool light (produced by conditioner or whatever) that decreases quality of your sleep.

So why do I choose making personal FOSS projects?

Due to possibility to start without all this parasitism from the very beginning.

Why not simply combine work on less risky projects and personal projects as well?

I’ve already done an honest series of experiments balancing time between providing my software development services to a really awesome company vs working solely on my projects.

I increased allocation of work on my projects up to 40% and stopped because that was still not enough.

Distributing focus on too many projects leads to mediocracy everywhere and constant burnout, which I’m still recovering from. 🧘‍♂️