Kit 🔻 (32)
Major contributors to burnout in open source:
- developers are struggling to a make a living
- toxic behaviour from community members wearing developers down
How about @signalapp ?
Signal has sooo many problems, Oğuz states:
- It's a walled garden
- There's no federation
- Nothing on F-Droid
- Threatened a developer who wanted to fork (apparently? don't have the details on this, just reporting)
- Everything must go through Signal's central servers, which .... as the recent outage shows, use AWS!
FOSDEM starting in a bit!
Some talks that could be interesting for workers:
31 Jan, 10:00
FOSS in times of war, scarcity and (adversarial) AI -> war always most hurts working people
We need to talk about war. And we need to talk about companies building bots that propose to rewrite our source code. And about the people behind both, and how we preserve what is great about FOSS while avoiding disruption. How do geopolitical conflicts on the one hand and the risk of bot-generated (adversarial) code on the other influence the global community working together on Free and Open Source software?
cc @techwerkers
Curious (or not?) that one of FOSDEM 2026's sponsors is google, which provides part of the tech infrastructure for israel to commit genocide in Palestine through its participation in project Nimbus...
some refs:
Sensitive content : disordered eating
These models are ingesting everything and anything, indiscriminately. They're over-eating
At a certain point they'll be ingesting their own excrement & barfing that up, suggests Leenaars
Reclaim the web! But how?
this talk by Jah Kosha which may have some answers:
The utopia, according to Margola, would be that everyone who wants to would be able to get paid a full wage for their work
Is this indeed a utopia? Would this be the desirable endpoint? 
Money changes everything. What would this mean for voluntary work?
"There's no Claude, there's just other people's code", Leenaars offers a reality check
First talk! Michiel Leenaars speaks on FOSS in times of war, scarcity and (adversarial) AI
Live here now: https://live.fosdem.org/watch/janson
Direct: https://stream.fosdem.org/janson.m3u8
Leenaars discusses the early days of the internet, how much optimism there was.
And how much, in retrospect, naïvité in choosing partnerships -- both with what became Big Tech and with governments