What even does "Open Source" mean at this point?

Corporations have learned to mimic human communication patterns to trick humans into propagating and sustaining them. Facebook here is particularly infamous for doing that at the cost of massive human suffering; Google, mutant anglerfish of a thousand "free" services that it is, does it at the cost of rendering large swathes of human knowledge inaccessible; Microsoft, as a predator of other corporations, gives us a mix of both outcomes. Apple is a bit of an outlier at this scale in that it seems to be motivated by pure greed for money, in the way one would expect of old-fashioned ideas of capitalism.

But make no mistake, "Open Source" was about exploitation from the beginning: it's about giving these ersatz emergent lifeforms inroads to colonise a space that was by and for real people, where interpersonal connections were once the main currency, to strip mine it and extract the surplus value. Without a real person on the other end of the line, when we are no longer writing and sharing software for the benefit of each other, and with the communication channel itself nowadays being interdicted and sterilised to keep people compartmentalised, that unwritten purpose for participating in FOSS has been completely undermined and perverted.

You can contribute to a billion-dollar Open Source project for years and the only thing that will so much as remember your email address is the recruiter spambot advertising fake job listings. It's a sucker's game. And becoming a militant FSF disciple won't provide relief either: it has never been as simple as libre vs proprietary. Software with an obvious master retains that power imbalance even in the presence of a "100% Vegan [A]GPLv3" sticker. Anyone who disagrees is welcome to try and get emacs and gcc to play nice together.

The core of "Free Software" can survive only if people start making an effort to reclaim it and perform some serious chemotherapy. But that is done via empathy, willpower, and clarity of purpose — with the sheer number of undesirable orbiters in FOSS who've been hypnotised to soil their pants violently upon encountering text documents asking them not to be raging bigots, others cheerleading over which alien mold spore they want to be the next master of their schemaless DB or containerization stack like a sportsball league, and a pervasive cult of "free speech" (and negative peace) that ensures the worst aspects will always grow until the rest of the room suffocates — realistically, this movement can do nothing from here on out but collapse under its own weight.

The future of free software will have to happen elsewhere, built by different people, who will be much more scrupulous who they let in.