Open Source isn't enought, we need governance

This is a general view on the topic. I think open-source isn’t enough, we need also governance for the software we use, and create small pockets of freedom.

All feedback is welcome.

jeferson.me/blog/2026/07/31/cooperative-software

Open source is fine, but if we depend on badly funded one man projects with a maintainer about to burn out, we’ve created an extremely fragile system.

The argument is of course that anyone can just pick up a project, fork it and make it better, but we have to remain realistic how often a tech stack can survive a fragmentation of an important project. Compatibility and interoperability is vital.

This can and maybe even should happen once in a while, but if it happens too often it’ll do damage to the userbase.

Almost the point, I don’t want to fragment a system, I want to federate then. Make more people using the system, focus on the protocol and make the system better. For example, Piefed, I’m writing this on a alternative face of the system, but because this is a federated, I don’t need to use the official front. At the same time, I focus on the showing the system for more people around me, and expanding it’s userbase (and money, but I was focus on the human instead of the money).

And hopefully these protocols are backward compatible so I can still use a limited feature set running an older version. I think this would be a big step towards avoiding any fragmentation.

I hate when software supports up to an arbitrary version number and if you just fake the version string in your client or framework it just works fine. Why set up arbitrary hurdles?