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I think the "open source" in FOSS is exactly what you look for. there is a software and it's source code is open and free to use. it says nothing about community, build system, infra, etc.
This whole thread seems weirdly dismissive of, and in some cases hostile to, maintainers of FOSS projects. To be clear, I'm not referring to OP here - the ID verification wall, and even the need to use a platform like Discord in general, are real problems. It's many of the responses that are problematic.
The reason many projects have support servers on Discord is because that's where their communities formed. For example, Rust has communities on Matrix and Discord. The majority of the community is on Discord. There's also a lot of users who discuss the language on Reddit.
Communities existing on proprietary, walled off platforms isn't the problem. The problem is when those platforms are the only way to access documentation or support. For projects like this, try creating an issue and explaining how ID verification stops you from accessing documentation and support, and see if they can open up discussions (if they're on GitHub), create a community wiki, etc.
As for what to call them - let's assume that anything that requires access to these platforms doesn't exist. What do you call that? FOSS with shitty documentation? It'd still be FOSS at least.
You're right and more than fair about it. Thanks for a mature response. I definitely get games catering to their communities and those communities, for the past decade or so, have been on Discord in droves... So it only makes sense. It just makes the world a little bit more painful for the people who don't want to use Discord. And I definitely also get that alternatives (Matrix, a dedicated wiki or web documentation, etc) might take more work for a dev to set up... I guess I just miss when the web felt more open and usable.
They use discord because they are too lazy to have real forums that need moderation and can end up airing their dirty laundry - they have to be very careful and on their best behavior because the whole internet can find what they say in search results.
Discord is right up there with social media for ruining society imo. I miss when gamefaqs was the default when a dev didn't have their own forums.
I have no issue with games having their own forums, so long as they aren't on Discord. Preferably a PieFed community at minimum. Just... Something public and searchable.
I miss the time when phpbb forums were ubiquitous. And they allowed for way more expressiveness than a Discord "Server"could ever be.
I wouldn't call it lazy to not want to host your own forums. Moderation, much as the average internet user loves to lambast it, is not an easy task at all. And that's not even giving any consideration to the hosting costs themselves; that's both money and time that many FOSS projects can't afford.
I'll agree that Discord is shit for a variety of reasons, but the solution is for something better than Discord to appear,^[This, maybe? I haven't tried it yet.] not to ask FOSS projects to do even more free work.
Moderation, much as the average internet user loves to lambast it, is not an easy task at all.
This is exactly why you should use ~~reddit~~ lemmy as a forum instead of discord. One of the repeated problems I have seen in the emulation on android community, is that there are many entittled children, who harass and troll in these communities. Moderators have to ban them, but the bans are per server. That means that each server has to deal with the same troll who kicks up a fuss, and then ban them. And then they create a new account and repeat. I have seen communities and projects die due to harassment and trolling and it makes me sad.
But on ~~reddit~~ Lemmy, instance bans could be applied to ban problematic users from many communities at once, saving and deduplicating work.
Moderation is a lot of work, but moderating a ~~reddit~~ Lemmy community is ultimately a team sport, rather than an individual one.
~~reddit~~ Lemmy
?
Moderators have to ban them, but the bans are per server.
If you want to avoid children in the server for whatever reason, mark the channel as NSFW (though this might trigger the age verification BS for some people). Even without that, Discord generally has a minimum age requirement, so if someone admits to being below that age, you can report their account (and server owners might need to if they want to avoid issues).
There are many benefits to switching to something forum-based like Lemmy though. Aside from freeing yourself from Discord's chokehold, you also get better archival of discussions for free, better discoverability through internet/post searches, better control over who can comment, a potential community of moderators, possibly better accessibility for visually-impaired people (even if only because images can have alt text), and so on.
Alternatives to Lemmy could be as simple as issues or discussions on the project, a community-maintained wiki, and so on.
I've thought for a long time that if a FOSS project wants to use Discord as its primary community center, they should build it on Matrix and have a bridge to Discord as a secondary.
That way, they get the larger reach and visibility of Discord for more of the normie crowd, without compromising their core FOSS user base and forcing them into proprietary solutions.
Matrix still has issues with rooms. There are a couple I've been in where the room breaks somehow and I have to join another one. The server is also a pain to run last I knew, and somehow, despite all the interest in it, nothing ever manages to rival the standard client and server.
I'd rather see Mov.im on XMPP get more usage once they finish implementing their more Discord-like features. They want to become an alternative since the age verification drama a few months ago, but it takes time to build the features. I'm hoping that becomes viable real soon.
Still, what I'd REALLY like for technical communities is for them to just use forums so the information can be archived in a searchable way. Discord is where information goes to die slowly, and an XMPP-based alternative wouldn't be much better.
I don't get what was wrong with forums in the first place, that motivated this shift to Discord. Forums seem far more usable.
People like the immediacy of live chat, which forums can't really replicate, and Discord provides voice chat. For certain things, I can't deny Discord is a more convenient format, so I see how it attracted people. Another big thing is it's totally free. Your tiny pet project with no funding or your tiny group of friends can have their own personal community at no cost. It's not terribly surprising to me that it gained so much ground. If someone was willing to hand out free, full featured communities on a different platform, they might be able to rival Discord, but Discord only offered it under promise of later enshittification, so I don't really expect anyone to step up like that.
Not to be contrarian, just running a Matrix server is awful, and Matrix has been plagued with security issues in the past, including basic crypto gaps due to lack of domain understanding in the implementation, which is shocking for what is touted as a security first project.
Moreover, I don't know of any acceptable alternatives.
I'm generally one of the first people on any FOSS bandwagon. I've been using Linux as my daily driver since 1999. Matrix is not simply "not as good" or "not up to feature parity" as alternatives. It is in my opinion unacceptably bad and the project leads seem to be actively hostile to efforts to make it better.
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point.en.html
There is a term to refer to projects like these: Open source. Open source, means to allow for collaborative development. User control of their systems, and/or privacy are not concerns when it comes to open source projects.
The thing is, some of us really care about ethics outside the scope of just what happens with the source. Is documentation and knowledge not just as important? Should our community not care about privacy? What do you think the "F" in "FOSS" is all about?
The "F" stands for "free". Free software is defined as having four essential freedoms:
- The freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose (freedom 0).
- The freedom to study how the program works, and change it so it does your computing as you wish (freedom 1). Access to the source code is a precondition for this.
- The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help others (freedom 2).
- The freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions to others (freedom 3). By doing this you can give the whole community a chance to benefit from your changes. Access to the source code is a precondition for this.
Notably, this definition places no restrictions on ethics. In fact, it explicitly states the opposite:
The freedom to run the program means the freedom for any kind of person or organization to use it on any kind of computer system, for any kind of overall job and purpose, without being required to communicate about it with the developer or any other specific entity. In this freedom, it is the user's purpose that matters, not the developer's purpose; you as a user are free to run the program for your purposes, and if you distribute it to other people, they are then free to run it for their purposes, but you are not entitled to impose your purposes on them.
What you are looking for is a different term, for example, "accessibility". Accessibility of information is very important, but source availability and limited restrictions are what make something FOSS.
some of us really care about ethics outside the scope of just what happens with the source.
And some don't. There are a ton of corporate open source projects that use slack as their main communication channel. You can try to convince them. But here you're just kind of preaching to the choir tbh.
What do you think the “F” in “FOSS” is all about?
Read the article I linked. It discusses problems with the term "FOSS".
Though, you should also take a look at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cathedral_and_the_Bazaar . Not every project actually wants to receive contributions from the public. Sometimes they only want to just dump the code on the net for people to review or fork.
There should be a term to distinguish between these different flavors of free. FOSS clearly has different levels of Free, but that doesn’t mean throw the baby and the bath water out. Something like caddy is clearly a different kind of FOSS than something like dbt fusion. So, there should be language to distinguish them. Then we can adequately talk about the matter maturely, using mature language with precise meaning.
dbt fusion
Seems to use the Elastic License: https://github.com/dbt-labs/dbt-fusion/blob/main/LICENSES.md
Which is simply not open source in the first place: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elasticsearch#Licensing_changes
Elasticsearch and Kibana would be relicensed from Apache License 2.0 to a dual license under the Server Side Public License and the Elastic License, neither of which is recognised as an open-source license.[
(although elasticsearch later changed back to the AGPL. As did Redis, and Mongo which also tried similar moves lmao).
It looks like there are a mere 4 Apache 2 (open source license) programs inside, but the other 40+ programs are behind that ELv2 license, so the program can't really be called open core even (term when some of the program is open source but some features are paid only and not open source).
So no, DBT fusion is not FOSS. DBT Fusion is source available, which is the term used to refer to when you can read the source code but there are legal restrictions on what you can do with it.
Sure, but that was also beside the point. Bad example, where I could have just referred to the software OP did. The point is there’s a distinction to be made with no language to make it. Some software is guaranteed free and open source, because its dependencies are also. Some open source software isn’t guaranteed as such. Without that guarantee, software has certain vulnerabilities which aren’t otherwise present. For instance, having a feature dependent upon closed source software makes part of the software:
- inauditable
- a vector to surveillance
- potentially unavailable on demand
- a vector for vendor lock-in
Those risks are mostly mitigated with software that doesn’t do this.
"This program has features you might not like" --F-droid warning.
I am a big fan of that flag.
I propose "demi-FLOSS".
Are they Free/Libre Open Source Software?
Yeah but . . .
"Zoomer FOSS"?
Having discord as development support platform screams Gen Z dev to me.
Keep in mind that this new generation of developers don't care about privacy because they're living in a post privacy era. They didn't experience open source communication methods which don't suck compared to commercial ones.
See also: https://github.com/element-hq/element-meta/issues/1476
They do not care because they focus on more important things like actually developing software. Sad to lose a few devs over this, but their project seems to be healthy regardless and they're definitely entitled to develop their FOSS however they want. You could fork it at any time if it bothers you that much, however I get why your experience is frustrating. I don't like walled gardens any more than you do...
PFOSS?
Partly Free Open Source Software?
In short, what do you call projects like this
half-hearted foss. Sure it is easier to rely on existing infrastructure, but keeping documentation or discussions (all tools already baked into github) in a walled garden? For shame, it shows that they can't be asses to actually get to know the tools they already have.
I wonder if this falls in scope of what's known as open-core? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-core_model
The "core" is technically FOSS, but that's about it.
This is an age old discussion. The FSF doesn't "approve" of Debian because it contains proprietary drivers (which are already in the Linux kernel). Even when Debian didn't have these drivers by default and you had to go out of your way to download an unofficial version that did have these drivers, that was too much for the FSF. Thing is, in most cases you need those drivers to get your hardware working properly. For instance (and IIRC), the latest WiFi version that has a WiFi card available where the drivers are fully open source is WiFi 4 (back then WiFi N).
There will always be a compromise (setting aside the ID thing on Discord, which is a whole other can of worms and affects open source software as well). Even if you're running only Linux (or FreeBSD or whatever other open source OS), there are in all likelihood still closed source drivers being used. Or, you decide to limit yourself to WiFi 4 or ethernet connections, for instance. OK, now you don't have any closed source drivers anymore, yay! Except... The processor and processor architecture your computer is running on isn't open source. Shit. And in fact, there currently is only one open source processor architecture: RISC-V, but that still has a bit of a ways to go until it's ready for mass adoption. And even then, I'm sure you'd find something closed source in whatever computer you'd be using. It's always (at least in the current day and age) a question of how much you can realistically have open source.
The situation with that game definitely seems a little more extreme in the other direction, unfortunately. The question that I'm wondering is: the game is open source, what's preventing you from compiling it yourself? That way you don't have to run it through steam. And if there aren't proper instructions, check the license of the original project, it may just be a violation of that license (since a clear compilation path is practically a part of the source code, since without you can't compile it and thus use it properly otherwise).
Ah sad to hear about that happening to Warsow - it certainly filled a niche once UT was sort of sunset...
it sucks that there seem to be no real non dead movement shooters. I am currently keeping an eye on:
- Quake live: has an active NA pickup games community
- Krunker.io : Mostly dead but many of the more dedicated players are still online, plus they host tournaments. Open source native Linux client.
- Warsow
And there were probably others. But so few.
There's also STRAFTAT, but that's 1v1 only.
Foss-ish
The word you're looking for is Enshittification.
Yes, it was originally coined for a very specific workflow, but the principle of the workflow is the same. Word meanings can expand, adjust and evolev.
This isn't what enshittification is, and I can't imagine any expanded definition that would include this either. Enshittification is when a company deliberately worsens a product for profit. FOSS projects don't have companies,^[Donation-managing leadership organizations notwithstanding, but those are rare.] nor do they have profit. Frankly, even if they did, the intents and methods inherent to the pattern of enshittifcation aren't present here. Unless you're talking about Discord itself, but that's tangential to OP's main point.
What these projects are doing is following the path of least resistance, which happens to go toward a walled garden at present. If there's a word for that, I don't know what it is, but it isn't enshittification.
Enshittification, as coined, requires a company, but enshittification, as the principle of the thing, only requires an owner or some sort of ruling body. Heck, it barely ever requires that: down the line it just means "making things shittier".
What these projects are doing is following the path of least resistance, which happens to go toward a walled garden at present.
If that path never before went through an open solution then it probs wouldn't be enshittification, yeah. But in reality it doesn't even need to change spaces to be enshittification: if you required Discord from the start, and it was Discord who enshittified its experience, you'd be enshittifying your product/service by proxy by not providing an alternative means of communication at that point.
this post was submitted on 17 May 2026
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