Rug pulls, forks, and open-source feudalism
13 comments
·September 6, 20253np
pjmlp
Depends on the actual software licence, many commercial vendors do provide source code, however the licence doesn't allow you to do whatever you feel like with code, even if technically it is possible to do so.
This happens a lot in commercial products where scripting languages are used, for example.
Or enterprise consulting as another example, where the code is delivered as part of the project, but it is bound to the agency for compiling purposes, unless the customer pays extra for that right.
anilgulecha
IMO if you're a technical decision maker, you should ignore fair source/business source stuff with extreme prejudice. These are fundamentally incompatible with the goal of having autonomy for your systems.
Only pick these if they're non-critical, have a significantly higher RoI, or a high commodity item.
andersmurphy
Not sure why this is getting down votes but I agree. Also building from source doesn't have to be hard (see sqlite).
OgsyedIE
I believe there should be a broader family of terms besides rug pull for when the intentions of vendors and developers change over time to become extractive and negative. No, enshittification is not the right word.
roenxi
It's nice to see an article that is just interesting. Although trying to model an environment of extreme freedom as 'feudal' is one of the big philosophic mistakes in the current discourse. Although it is easy to establish that the majors are very sticky they're only sticky as long as they do a good job. Groups like AWS or Google are actually pretty vulnerable - the US right wing looked like it was about to build a complete alternative internet for a while there until the management in tech relented and allowed them to speak up in public. Places like AWS had to pull their head in and the spin offs from that like Rumble or Truth Social haven't gone away, they just partially marginalised when the censorship backed off. That isn't how feudal revolts work in my understanding; typically peasants just got squished by better armed, armoured and organised soldier classes.
BinaryIgor
Exactly; there are many mechanism in-place that allow us (anybody) to create alternatives if the currently dominant players start to misbehave too much; they just have not
delusional
You worldview is incredibly foreign to me, but I'll try to engage fairly with it.
> the US right wing looked like it was about to build a complete alternative internet for a while there
This would seem to imply that the established internet, what we had before this relenting, was somehow left wing. Is that an accurate description of your view? When did this relenting take place?
> they just partially marginalised when the censorship backed off.
Is it your position that Truth Social (the social network started by the current president of the united states) is currently a marginalized space?
> That isn't how feudal revolts work in my understanding; typically peasants just got squished by better armed, armoured and organised soldier classes.
I think it's interesting that you posit this as a fight between the "peasants" and the "soliders". I'm assuming, to make sense of your analogy, that the "peasants" in this case is the current president of the united states and Elon Musk. the "soliders" would then be "Jeff Bezos" and "Sundar Pichai"
palmfacehn
>This would seem to imply that the established internet, what we had before this relenting, was somehow left wing.
I would omit the left-wing characterization as a debatable generalization. Perhaps it would be better described as the specific platforms being opposition partisans, rather than the Internet itself.
delusional
> Perhaps it would be better described as the specific platforms being opposition partisans
I'm sympathetic to such an argument, but it does beg the question: Which platforms? The original comments choices of singling out Rumble and Truth Social, would imply that YouTube and Twitter would at least be _among_ those "specific platforms" but neither of those platforms are, at least according to the left, particularly left wing. Both platform have repeatedly been criticized for creating and propagating structures that lead people down what was called "the alt-right pipeline" and has, historically, hosted some of the most active alt-right figureheads.
That's not to say either platform is or was right-wing either. I'm not the one making an argument. Though I'm not convinced they were particularly left-wing or partisan before the creation of Rumble and Truth Social.
positron26
Without commercializing the non-contributor users, they have really no leverage in any of the relationships. Connecting them together by pooling their financial power to pull in contributors creates a real force to resist rug pulls a la Val-key. That is one of the kinds of thinking behind PrizeForge and why I'm implementing bare-minimum Postgres backups today because we're a fledgling startup and need Rust engineers: https://positron.solutions/careers
evrennetwork
[dead]
Building the software you rely on from source by default is one way to reduce the impact these events have on you and shift the power dynamic. If you're installing binaries/images from a vendor (free or otherwise), transitioning to a fork may be an undertaking and a sweaty risk-assessment.
Switching your existing build-infra to sync sources from a new remote should be a snap.
Also no major need to hound maintainers to ship a release or merge that neglected bugfix or feature you desperately need - just cherry-pick it.