TechTakes

Quick follow-up, for the sake of furthering my argument:

Baldur, whilst talking about the aforementioned loss of FOSS surplus, laid out a worst-case scenario, where a vicious cycle collapses the FOSS ecosystem:

1. Declining surplus and burnout leads to maintainers increasingly stepping back from their projects.

2. Many of these projects either bitrot serious bugs or get taken over by malicious actors who are highly motivated because they can’t relay^[sic]^ on pervasive memory bugs anymore for exploits.

3. OSS increasingly gets a reputation (deserved or not) for being unsafe and unreliable. [This drives away users as a result.]

4. That decline in users leads to even more maintainers stepping back. [return to step 1]

As a consequence of the slop-nami, I'd argue the perfect conditions for this vicious cycle have already emerged:

1. The slopnami has done plenty to exacerbate existing burnout in current maintainers - slop bug reports, scrapers and AI bros DDoSing services, AI bros in general and the myriad other negative externalities of this bubble have been utterly draining to deal with.

2. As (indirectly) mentioned before, the slopnami has given a variety of serious bugs and security issues - rsync's broken backups, the rise of slopsquatting and prompt injection attacks, Linux's recent race condition mishap, the list goes on.