The Chudification of Open Source

Published on 2026/09/02

I’ve been a citizen of the internet for basically my whole life. In many ways it raised me. My first exposure to open source software came in the 5th grade, when my Dad - frustrated that I kept getting viruses on our home Windows PC - installed Ubuntu on it instead. That one decision set me on a trajectory that made me who I am today.

See, when you put a 5th grader in front of a Linux PC back when Linux couldn’t run very many games, he needs to find ways to keep himself entertained. So I discovered WINE and PlayOnLinux, taught myself how to make Pokemon ROM hacks, and a year or so later found my way into the PSP hacking scene.

I bring these up because it was through these spaces that I first got introduced to the free software movement, and found myself part of a community that was bigger than anything I’d been a part of before. The people I met there had strong morals and ethics, and they passed them on to me. No matter who we were or where we came from, we all believed that software should be legible, modifiable, and owned by the people who used it. In a world dominated by Windows and other corpoware, that made us the counterculture - and we willingly gave away our labor because we believed in the good we were doing.

By the time I was finishing up high school, open source was starting to go mainstream. It got absorbed into every corporate stack on Earth (no thanks to the OSI and their laundering of the term “open source”), and somewhere in that transition, a specific kind of person got let in: the ones who were never in it for the philosophy, only for what they could extract from it.

Now, as an almost 30-year-old, the landscape is unrecognizable. It feels like every other day I’m finding out that some project I use and like is run by people who are morally/ethically bankrupt and running defense for fascists and Nazis in spite of community outrage.

I’ve had a few different versions of this blog post drafted for a while, but the last few months really pushed me into finishing it. Let’s talk about it.

Three incidents, one pattern

Let’s start with Mullvad. I was a Mullvad user for over a decade. I supported them and recommended them wholeheartedly to anyone who needed a VPN during this time. In June of this year, we found out that Daniel Berntsson, co-founder and co-owner of Mullvad personally donated roughly 5 million SEK to Sweden’s Örebro Party. This was 72% of the party’s entire 2025 income and effectively bankrolled them from being a fringe operation into being nationally relevant. The party’s core platform is “remigration” - deporting migrants - which their leader Markus Allard has described as “getting rid of parasites.”

Mullvad’s other co-CEO publicly distanced the company from the donation, but that doesn’t undo the fact that a huge chunk of the profits from people trusting Mullvad with their privacy just got funneled into an anti-immigration campaign. I have since stopped using Mullvad and can no longer recommend it in good conscience.

Then there’s the most recent one, Neovim. This one isn’t about money at all but more about a trend I’ve noticed in open source software. When someone asked core developer Justin Keyes to remove a testimonial from DHH off the project’s homepage, the response was that of apathy and vilifying the person who opened the issue as “starting drama”. No debate, no acknowledgement that platforming someone this well-documented might be worth a few minutes of consideration. The blatant apathy and refusal to engage with the people who are actually using your software and expressing concern is astounding.

And then there’s Framework. Back in October last year, the company that built its entire brand around right-to-repair ethics and doing hardware the responsible way, announced that it had become a Gold tier sponsor of Hyprland at 600 EUR a month, and started promoting Omarchy on its social media alongside it. Its own community forum erupted with a thread bluntly titled “Framework supporting far-right racists?” that ran past 900 replies. The Discord got locked and their volunteer moderators all left. When the CEO showed up to respond, he didn’t apologize or reconsider. He explained that Framework “deliberately creates a big tent” and doesn’t partner with people based on their beliefs, values, or political stances. This is NOT neutrality and it grinds my gears that anyone thinks this is an okay position to have.

Here’s an excellent blog post detailing the whole Framework/Omarchy incident if you want to dive deeper.

Refusing to have a position on whether you’ll fund a man who is on record advocating for removing Romani people from Europe is itself a position. It’s just one dressed up as principle so it doesn’t have to answer for itself. Neutrality in the face of openly fascist rhetoric is not neutrality, it’s taking the fascist’s side but being too much of a coward to stand by it yourself.

Three different failure modes - personal complicity, blunt apathy, institutional rationalization - but the same underlying rot. A Nazi is a Nazi. I’m not going to launder that into “controversial figure” or “divisive personality” or other specific academic verbiage because it’s more comfortable to read. The essays exist, the language is specific, and sugarcoating it with euphemism is exactly why this metastasized the way that it has. If you need the receipts to reach that conclusion yourself, they’re not hard to find, that’s the point. Nobody involved in any of these decisions can plausibly claim they did not know.

The ecosystem that makes this possible

None of this works without an ecosystem that’s stopped asking who it’s platforming. Open source ran for decades on an assumption of good faith - that the people showing up to contribute, sponsor, or maintain actually believed in the thing. That assumption is now a vulnerability. It lets people who’ve learned the vocabulary of the culture without absorbing any of its values walk in the front door, get their testimonials pinned to homepages, and use the community’s own trust infrastructure as cover.

Also, the Framework blowup didn’t teach anyone anything, because it couldn’t have been more public. 900+ replies, a locked Discord, moderators quitting in protest, coverage everywhere - and companies kept signing on anyway. 1Password became a “Distinguished Corporate Patron” of DHH’s Omacom Foundation the other day pledging $100,000 a year for three years. This is happening nearly a year after Sidekiq had pulled its own funding from Ruby Central over the exact same association. Every subsequent outside sponsor has had full information and decided the reputational cost was worth it regardless. That’s the part that should actually worry people - not that one company got this wrong once, but that getting it wrong in public, loudly, with your own community yelling at you, isn’t even a deterrent anymore.

This is all compounding with a second rot running in parallel: the wholesale devaluation of programming as a craft. There’s a real contradiction in people who’d never accept an AI-generated novel or an AI-generated painting shrugging when the same extraction happens to code, on the theory that programming “isn’t really a creative endeavor”.

The “how” - the taste, the judgement about what’s elegant versus merely functional, the years of pattern-recognition that go into good architecture - is the actual art, and it’s disappearing under a pile of vibecoded slop nobody bothered to understand before shipping. It’s not just a craft problem either. Every hour of “just describe what you want and let the model produce it” is an hour where the person who used to do that work - who used to learn by doing that work - gets a little more optional. That’s alienation from labor in the plainest sense: the product gets made, the value gets extracted, and the person whose skill the product used to depend on is nudged further from the process that used to be theirs.

Put those two rots together and you get a scene that’s simultaneously more profitable and less trustworthy than it’s ever been - full of people extracting value from a culture they don’t believe in, building software nobody involved really understands, sold by companies that have decided that looking the other way is the cheaper option.

How do we solve this?

Boycotts feel good and occasionally work, but they’re a blunt instrument for a problem that’s fundamentally about information asymmetry. The more durable fix is to normalize disclosure up front and not as an afterthought.

Project maintainers and companies SHOULD be upfront about who they’re funding and who’s funding them, before the community has to go digging through blog archives to find out what a “distinguished patron” actually stands for. I shouldn’t have to reverse-engineer a developer or company’s politics from sponsorship announcements. If a project or company wants my labor, my data, my money, or my support, the absolute least it owes me is not making me guess about where their values lie.