How would you undermine open source software? (feddit.uk)

submitted 4 hours ago* (last edited 1 hour ago) by Wudi@feddit.uk to c/asklemmy@lemmy.world

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You are a senior executive at Adobe.

The CEO of Adobe summons you in his office.

You are in charge of creating a secret task force. The goal is to systematically undermine open source software such as Krita, Inkscape, Kdenlive or GIMP. You have a $50 million budget. Nobody in the company knows about this project except you and Adobe's CEO.

What would you do?

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[-] silasmariner@programming.dev 24 points 4 hours ago

Spam poor quality llm commits from sockpuppet accounts to a bunch of popular projects. Sprinkle in some subtly-buggy contributions from more established accounts. The buggy contributions should not be obviously malicious (not, like, obfuscated credit stealers -- they should just break things). Do this to as many projects as you can without making it super obvious. Prefer projects with few maintainers but a high merge rate. Then, go think about what you did, you bastard.

[-] notabot@piefed.social 4 points 3 hours ago

This is what I came to say. If you want to undermine open source software, you undermine the maintainers who hold it all together. Swamp them in pull requests, some that are genuine, some with subtle bugs, some that are nonsense. Also try to start flame wars and circulate unsavory rumours about them, claim they are sexist, ableist, racist, or that they are trying to capture the software fir big business, or anything else that might drive a wedge between them and their community. Ideally, drive them out of OSS entirely and encourage a large enough portion of their audience to switch to a fork you maintain through a sock puppet account. At that point you control the software, regardless of the OSS tag on it, and can go about degrading it slowly.

this post was submitted on 12 Jun 2026

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