There’s a popular-ish open source game I remember playing a few years ago, Warsow, and when I checked on it now, it’s been forked and while the fork is genuinely better and funner to play in so many ways, it expects to be launched through Steam. I wanted to tinker with maps and stuff and started researching, and while I did find what I was looking for somewhat in older Warsow-related threads, when I went to the official warfork-qfusion github repo looking for specific documentation for the new fork, I was greeted with a link to their Discord “if you have any questions”. (edit: to be clear, I mean that there was nothing under the “wiki” tab of their official github except for a brief note directing people to their Discord. No real public-facing official documentation that I could find other than that pointer to discord.)
Yet this game brands itself FOSS, and it is technically released under a FOSS license and their github shows that they are actively developing it in cooperation with a community - just not a community you can be in without accepting certain walled gardens. It honestly sucks to see. I wanna access threads discussing this software, but I won’t be able to unless I go through an ID verification process and trust a silicon valley company to both secure my data and not use it in some nefarious way. And to even run the game, I had to accept Steam, which I honestly didn’t have to do in order to run Warsow back in the day, and I enjoyed that - what was wrong with just shipping a binary and letting people launch it how they like, with optional integrations? What’s wrong with having an open forum for tech questions? Why wall the garden that you’re making supposedly open products in?
In short, what do you call projects like this - the increasingly common projects that, while technically FOSS, put all their documentation and discussion on discord, and seem to expect their users to swallow unsavory default options or even use proprietary middle-ware or launchers? Proprietary FOSS?
This whole thread seems weirdly dismissive of, and in some cases hostile to, maintainers of FOSS projects. To be clear, I’m not referring to OP here - the ID verification wall, and even the need to use a platform like Discord in general, are real problems. It’s many of the responses that are problematic.
The reason many projects have support servers on Discord is because that’s where their communities formed. For example, Rust has communities on Matrix and Discord. The majority of the community is on Discord. There’s also a lot of users who discuss the language on Reddit.
Communities existing on proprietary, walled off platforms isn’t the problem. The problem is when those platforms are the only way to access documentation or support. For projects like this, try creating an issue and explaining how ID verification stops you from accessing documentation and support, and see if they can open up discussions (if they’re on GitHub), create a community wiki, etc.
As for what to call them - let’s assume that anything that requires access to these platforms doesn’t exist. What do you call that? FOSS with shitty documentation? It’d still be FOSS at least.
You’re right and more than fair about it. Thanks for a mature response. I definitely get games catering to their communities and those communities, for the past decade or so, have been on Discord in droves… So it only makes sense. It just makes the world a little bit more painful for the people who don’t want to use Discord. And I definitely also get that alternatives (Matrix, a dedicated wiki or web documentation, etc) might take more work for a dev to set up… I guess I just miss when the web felt more open and usable.
who discuss the language on Reddit
oooh, you weren’t talking about the videogame Rust, lol
Given OP was about the videogame Warsow, I guess I defaulted to the videogame Rust instead of the programming language Rust - even though, obviously, that game is not FOSS
Does the game even have a Matrix community? To be honest, all I know about the game is that people kept going to the language’s subreddit posting about the game and getting their posts removed. Also, something about the new player experience being abysmal at one point, though I don’t know if that has changed.
“This program has features you might not like” --F-droid warning.
I am a big fan of that flag.
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point.en.html
There is a term to refer to projects like these: Open source. Open source, means to allow for collaborative development. User control of their systems, and/or privacy are not concerns when it comes to open source projects.
The thing is, some of us really care about ethics outside the scope of just what happens with the source. Is documentation and knowledge not just as important? Should our community not care about privacy? What do you think the “F” in “FOSS” is all about?
The “F” stands for “free”. Free software is defined as having four essential freedoms:
- The freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose (freedom 0).
- The freedom to study how the program works, and change it so it does your computing as you wish (freedom 1). Access to the source code is a precondition for this.
- The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help others (freedom 2).
- The freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions to others (freedom 3). By doing this you can give the whole community a chance to benefit from your changes. Access to the source code is a precondition for this.
Notably, this definition places no restrictions on ethics. In fact, it explicitly states the opposite:
The freedom to run the program means the freedom for any kind of person or organization to use it on any kind of computer system, for any kind of overall job and purpose, without being required to communicate about it with the developer or any other specific entity. In this freedom, it is the user’s purpose that matters, not the developer’s purpose; you as a user are free to run the program for your purposes, and if you distribute it to other people, they are then free to run it for their purposes, but you are not entitled to impose your purposes on them.
What you are looking for is a different term, for example, “accessibility”. Accessibility of information is very important, but source availability and limited restrictions are what make something FOSS.
some of us really care about ethics outside the scope of just what happens with the source.
And some don’t. There are a ton of corporate open source projects that use slack as their main communication channel. You can try to convince them. But here you’re just kind of preaching to the choir tbh.
What do you think the “F” in “FOSS” is all about?
Read the article I linked. It discusses problems with the term “FOSS”.
Though, you should also take a look at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cathedral_and_the_Bazaar . Not every project actually wants to receive contributions from the public. Sometimes they only want to just dump the code on the net for people to review or fork.
I’ve thought for a long time that if a FOSS project wants to use Discord as its primary community center, they should build it on Matrix and have a bridge to Discord as a secondary.
That way, they get the larger reach and visibility of Discord for more of the normie crowd, without compromising their core FOSS user base and forcing them into proprietary solutions.
Not to be contrarian, just running a Matrix server is awful, and Matrix has been plagued with security issues in the past, including basic crypto gaps due to lack of domain understanding in the implementation, which is shocking for what is touted as a security first project.
Moreover, I don’t know of any acceptable alternatives.
I’m generally one of the first people on any FOSS bandwagon. I’ve been using Linux as my daily driver since 1999. Matrix is not simply “not as good” or “not up to feature parity” as alternatives. It is in my opinion unacceptably bad and the project leads seem to be actively hostile to efforts to make it better.
Maybe I’m out of touch, but I will never understand why people use discord for documentation. To me that’s like using YouTube comments as a tech support helpdesk. You can probably make it work but there are waaay better tools out there.
I think the “open source” in FOSS is exactly what you look for. there is a software and it’s source code is open and free to use. it says nothing about community, build system, infra, etc.
Ah sad to hear about that happening to Warsow - it certainly filled a niche once UT was sort of sunset…
it sucks that there seem to be no real non dead movement shooters. I am currently keeping an eye on:
- Quake live: has an active NA pickup games community
- Krunker.io : Mostly dead but many of the more dedicated players are still online, plus they host tournaments. Open source native Linux client.
- Warsow
And there were probably others. But so few.
Foss-ish
I propose “demi-FLOSS”.
Are they Free/Libre Open Source Software?
Yeah but . . .
The word you’re looking for is Enshittification.
Yes, it was originally coined for a very specific workflow, but the principle of the workflow is the same. Word meanings can expand, adjust and evolev.
This isn’t what enshittification is, and I can’t imagine any expanded definition that would include this either. Enshittification is when a company deliberately worsens a product for profit. FOSS projects don’t have companies,[1] nor do they have profit. Frankly, even if they did, the intents and methods inherent to the pattern of enshittifcation aren’t present here. Unless you’re talking about Discord itself, but that’s tangential to OP’s main point.
What these projects are doing is following the path of least resistance, which happens to go toward a walled garden at present. If there’s a word for that, I don’t know what it is, but it isn’t enshittification.
Donation-managing leadership organizations notwithstanding, but those are rare. ↩︎
Enshittification, as coined, requires a company, but enshittification, as the principle of the thing, only requires an owner or some sort of ruling body. Heck, it barely ever requires that: down the line it just means “making things shittier”.
What these projects are doing is following the path of least resistance, which happens to go toward a walled garden at present.
If that path never before went through an open solution then it probs wouldn’t be enshittification, yeah. But in reality it doesn’t even need to change spaces to be enshittification: if you required Discord from the start, and it was Discord who enshittified its experience, you’d be enshittifying your product/service by proxy by not providing an alternative means of communication at that point.
