Your Worth Is Determined by Your Sacrifices

"Work 'til you bleed, ennobled by labour, Then purchase relief from your local retailer" - The Fine Print by The Stupendium

Recently, I had to cut someone off who was using me for unpaid tech support. No reciprocity, no respect for time, just the assumption that because I could help, I should.

That moment forced me to confront something I’ve been circling for years: how casually the open source world normalizes extraction, and how easily “community” becomes a polite word for free labor.

I’ve been in the Linux ecosystem for most of my life. I made the switch back when Ubuntu mailed physical CDs and TechTV still meant engineers explaining systems instead of pop-culture noise. I watched Linux grow from a fringe alternative into the backbone of the modern internet.

And somewhere along the way, the relationship changed.

The Fine Print was written for The Outer Worlds, a dystopia built around company towns where workers earn wages only to spend them back into the same corporate ecosystem that owns their housing, their food, and their future.

The horror isn’t violence or spectacle. It’s banality. You work. You survive. And your survival funds the system that trapped you.

That model feels uncomfortably familiar.

Linux now underpins the majority of government data centers, healthcare systems, and the world’s most powerful supercomputers. Yet many of the people maintaining critical components do so unpaid, under-supported, and increasingly burned out.

Corporations are happy to consume open source. They are far less enthusiastic about sustaining the humans behind it.

I actively try to help where I can. Many of us do. But even well-intentioned contributors eventually hit the same wall: the quiet shift from volunteerism to expectation.

We’ve seen it repeatedly.

Maintainers pushed out or sidelined while accessibility concerns are waved away. Projects declared “legacy” while entire classes of users still depend on them. Individuals carrying enormous technical responsibility with little institutional backing, because someone upstream decided the community would absorb the cost.

This isn’t accidental. It’s structural.

Take Red Hat under IBM ownership.

This isn’t about history as a moral cudgel. It’s about continuity of incentives. IBM’s business model has always been the same: sell infrastructure and services to powerful institutions, regardless of downstream use. The customers change. The logic does not.

Through Red Hat, IBM holds enterprise and government contracts across Europe and Asia, including with states where surveillance, censorship, and political repression are not theoretical concerns. From the corporate perspective, this is “neutral infrastructure.” From the community’s perspective, it means governance decisions increasingly align with enterprise and state clients rather than with developers or users.

The branding is modern. The calculus is not.

Open source didn’t corrupt these companies. It made them cheaper

The hostility toward X11 and the people maintaining it didn’t come from nowhere. Accessibility tooling, legacy workflows, and real-world users still depend on X11. Yet maintaining it became socially and institutionally unfashionable.

One of the primary developers keeping X11 functional was pushed out, and now there’s serious discussion of reverting to older code rather than acknowledging that not everyone can simply “move on.”

That tells you everything you need to know about whose needs are being prioritized.

When governance follows corporate convenience instead of user reality, accessibility is always the first thing sacrificed.

Asahi Linux exists because Apple refused to meaningfully support Linux on its own hardware after moving away from x86. The project filled a gap Apple created.

The harassment its lead endured was indefensible. That shouldn’t even need saying. But the burnout was also predictable. When corporations benefit from open source outcomes while withholding cooperation, documentation, or meaningful support, the pressure collapses onto a handful of people.

That isn’t a community failure. It’s a governance failure.

Apple was once kept alive by open source. Darwin itself was built on it. Yet today, cooperation is grudging at best, adversarial at worst. The expectation is clear: the community will do the hard work upstream, and corporations will integrate downstream when it suits them.

I’ve been vocal about my unease with compiler monoculture in kernel development. This is not an attack on any particular language. It’s a risk assessment.

Ken Thompson demonstrated decades ago how deeply compromise can hide in toolchains. Concentrating critical infrastructure around a single production-ready compiler increases systemic risk, regardless of how well-intentioned the maintainers are.

Raising these concerns increasingly gets framed as obstruction or reactionary thinking. But caution is not sabotage. Diversity in tooling is resilience. Monoculture is fragility.

Linux didn’t fail. It succeeded.

And that success made it exploitable.

The more indispensable Linux became, the easier it was for corporations and institutions to assume the community would handle security audits, long-term maintenance, and human cost. These responsibilities were externalized downward while control and decision-making moved upward.

I’ve watched this before. Bitcoin’s core developers fractured under similar pressures when corporate and financial interests flooded in. The technical arguments were real, but the underlying cause was governance capture and burnout.

When contributors are treated as replaceable inputs instead of stakeholders, fragmentation isn’t surprising. It’s inevitable.

This isn’t about hating open source. I’m here because I care about it.

But there is a difference between cooperation and martyrdom.

If a system only functions when people sacrifice themselves without support, without protection, and without a voice, then people will walk away. Not out of spite. Out of self-preservation.

Linux was beloved because it empowered people.
It will lose that love if it keeps consuming them instead.

At some point, someone has to say no.
And sometimes, that someone has to be you.