Why Open Source Is Shit

The Care Bears World

In the Care Bears world, knowledge is free.

The ignorant have total access to it, without learning, without effort, without difficulty, without intermediaries.

Everything is served to them on a silver platter: knowledge, tips, know-how.

And above all, the ignorant must remain free. They must not be subjected to any constraint, any power dynamic.

They must not feel humiliated by their ignorance, nor by the fact that they made no effort, nor by the existence of a natural hierarchy of knowledge.

No, they must be able to obtain everything. Free to access knowledge, experience, without filters, without mediation. Just them and their screen.

In this world, knowledge is not earned: it is given.

Reality

In reality, open source is theft. Organized and systematic plundering of intellectual property.

How many contributors have never been paid for essential contributions?

Take the example of the author of GPG.

GPG is the core of digital exchange security. It encrypts files, protects banking exchanges, guarantees confidentiality in ultra-regulated environments such as PCI-DSS (payment industry)…

Without GPG, many companies in the financial sector would not even be able to operate.

And yet, in 2015, its author writes an email announcing that he is stopping. He has lived on less than €20,000 a year for ten years.

His software secures most of the world’s interbank money transfers.

But he lives like a tramp at his mother’s place, over 40 years old.

Thousands of companies — some generating billions — use GPG as the cornerstone of their security. None pay. No one compensates the author.

He starves while others cash in.

GPG is also used in journalism: it protects communication with sources. It saves lives. And yet, even there, no one pays.

And this is not an isolated case. Linux, same story.

Before the 1990s, operating systems were paid, closed. That filtered things at least a little.

Then Linux came along, open source, and the explosion of free and open access.

You know the expression “casting pearls before swine”? That’s exactly it.

Except here, weapons are given to predators.

Not a single CAC 40 company or US top 500 company runs without Linux.

Open source runs the global economy.

And also wars.

And also mass immigration.

Without open source, no Internet as we know it. And therefore no WhatsApp, Telegram, social networks, etc.

Mass immigration is inseparable from the Internet.

What is the first thing given to migrants when they arrive?

• A 4G subscription
• Free charging points
• A smartphone (if they don’t already have one)

Result: they stay connected to home from 10,000 km away, as if they had never left their village. WhatsApp video calls from the church square, nice and easy.

Internet and mass immigration are the same thing.

And the Internet is open source.

The Crowdsourcing Myth

Open source is based on crowdsourcing: outsourcing work to the crowd.

You take passionate people, often naive, and tell them: “Code, contribute, it’ll look good on your CV.”

Thousands do it for free, hoping for a job, recognition, social validation.

But recognition from whom? Other volunteers trapped in the same scheme.

It’s the sunk cost fallacy: you’ve put in so much effort that you refuse to admit you were screwed.

You keep going. You feed the myth.

And who benefits? The big players, the predators.

In most cases, you’ll end up a poorly paid consultant for a mediocre consulting firm.

And you will have produced free code. You will have armed other idiots.

Let’s Talk About Weapons

Open source and the arms industry: a great love story.

The war in Ukraine has shown it clearly: drones have become weapons of war.

In 2016, I was doing recreational drone flying with friends, in a field.

Everything was open source: the flight controller, the radio control, the Arduino boards.

With little money, we made incredible machines fly. And the code was ours.

Today? That same open source code is used to blow up soldiers. In videos you can find everywhere.

Chinese manufacturers, once focused on leisure, have become arms dealers. You buy this stuff on AliExpress or Banggood. And it kills.

Beautiful, open source.

Recently, controversy in the Linux distribution NixOS.

NixOS is special: it is declarative, guarantees homogeneous installations. Very clean.

But the sponsors of its community events? Arms companies.

NixOS is used in military drones. Recruiters come to find their developers there.

And volunteer contributors offer their know-how on a platter.

For what? To help “the ignorant”?

In short, open source is the nuclear core of our techno-society. All the side effects — war, surveillance, precarity — are to its credit.

The Panopticon

We denounce mass surveillance? But it would not exist without open source.

It was idealistic hackers, inclusive, woke, transgender and libertarian types who built all this.

2015–2016: historic turning point.

“Codes of conduct” arrive. Inclusion, LGBTQ+, tolerance.

Why? To better make the surveillance pill go down.

But don’t worry: this surveillance is ethical, open source, inclusive and tolerant.

Phew, honor is preserved.

Android, the OS that tracks you 24/7, is open source.

Everything’s fine. Chill.

The Security Myth

The great narrative delirium of open source is to endlessly claim that access to source code guarantees security.

Reality is more comical.

The Linux kernel has about 4,000 developers. Of which 3,990 are employees of large companies (Intel, GAFAM, …).

None of these developers has an overall vision of the kernel. Their only expertise is the dozen files they obsessively stare at for years.

And outside of those 4,000 developers, no one else reads the kernel source code.

No one scrutinizes it, analyzes it, and hunts for vulnerabilities.

Everyone pushes code trusting that someone else will read and fix it. Which almost never happens.

That’s precisely why Linus Torvalds’ biting outbursts, the father of the Linux kernel, are so widely publicized.

Because the myth that the code is reviewed must be maintained.

Cathedral and Bazaar

A founding text of open source is called The Cathedral and the Bazaar.

It opposes the rational order of the cathedral to the creative chaos of the bazaar.

This opposition makes no sense.

Bazaars in the West were inside cathedrals, which outside religious services served as what we now call shopping centers.

The bazaar was governed and subjected to the order of the cathedral. But what order? The metaphysical, moral, and ethical order.

When the bazaar was inside the cathedral, few tried to fuck you over, cheat you, steal from you, swindle you, poison you.

Open source, as a bazaar free from all cathedral regulation, is nothing but third-world Rousseauist exoticism.

The child of the pseudo-Enlightenment of the Renaissance, whose permanent work is the destruction of Christian civilization.

It is the parasitism of predators at the top feeding off the candor of those below.

It is systemic resilience, symbolized by Stallman himself, the father of open source, becoming a co-actor of his own misfortune.

Instead of revolting against the publisher imposing its technical choices, he decides to become a co-actor in his drama by entering into resilience.

He founds the GNU Foundation, writes open source software, which some time later is taken over and becomes the weapon of those he thought he was fighting through resilience.

Ultimate irony.

However, upon reflection, I am not so sure he was ever a victim.

This story perfectly matches the chimerical dialectic of modernism.

Code Is Law

Code is law.

In the artificial world of technology, automatons are governed only by code. Code is therefore the law of automatons.

Any action of an automaton is only the consequence of previous actions and the code that determines it.

Open source has enabled the invasion of the technical legal corpus into all facets of humanity.

Establishing globalized technical totalitarianism.

So a big thank you to all those idiots mesmerized by the beautiful idealistic discourse of open source.

The human judge is replaced by the algorithm, perfectly matching the logic of quantitative justice.

Humans constantly suffer the daily penalties of decisions algorithmic judgments.

The smartphone is nothing more than the executioner of coder-clerks serving white-collar predatory magistrates.

There can no longer be a people, because peoples have been dispossessed of their ability to build a legal system.

The greatest hacking of technology was to preempt justice. And this thanks to the complete artificialization of the human environment subjected to technology and therefore to the algorithm.

With the great complicity of open source.

Thank you to them.

Those people capable of working for pizza and Coke during a hackathon weekend organized by the greatest predators of humanity.