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?
If I am a senior executive at Adobe, and given this task, I would immediately resign.
It tells me that Adobe feels like GIMP, Krita and Kdenlive is an existential threat, which is just an utter delusion.
It tells me that the CEO is acting on false information, and I don’t want to be part of that.
Now, for the sake of argument, let’s say that I stayed, and I did partake in this stupid endeavor.
I wouldn’t do anything to the software projects at all, instead I would have Adobe release a suite of free tools, say 90% stripped down versions of Photoshop, Premiere and Illustrator, they would be very limited, naturally, but they would use the same workflow as the real deal.
That would make people far more familiar with Adobe products and push for their use in businesses.
To be frank, I highly doubt that Adobe cares about what people use at home, what matters is what the businesses use, they are easier and more profitable to go after.
The two killer features that any commercial software has over open source when it comes to business are:
- Standardization - like it or not, the world is standardized on Microsoft Office, people know how to use it, the format works well between different companies, and it is just the standard, do you want to be the CTO that has to answer to the CEO when the company can’t collaborate with other companies because they can’t open your files due to you picking Libre Office over the standard? The day to day work comes first, then you can start considering alternatives, in a years long testing program. Same goes for Adobe, do you want to have to answer to the board why a very highly paid marketing department can’t work due to you refusing to give them the standard tool? No, you don’t, so you get the standard.
- Support, you probably won’t use it ever, but fact is that with commercial software you have an entity you can refer to for help when it shits the bed, or they have a legal entity you can sue if you are pissed off. That last part should not be discounted too quickly, management likes having someone to blame, picking an open source alternative means that the buck stops with you, picking a commercial software means that you can pass the buck to them.
Source: Fifteen years as an IT guy.
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.
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.
Dropping all of that budget to art universities to have them teach Adobe software primarily. Inkscape, Kdenlive and GIMP do not have the funds to compete in this way, and once people learn a software to do their job, it becomes really hard to switch. Sure, enthausists can learn other open software, that’s not my target audience. My target audience is the one that uses such software to earn their money, and most of them will pursue higher education before doing so to learn their tools better, and Adobe will make that money back really easily with their subscription plans.
That’s why Apple used to give computers to schools (plus tax write-offs). Every school, and most classrooms, had Apple ][ computers in the 80’s.
Despite answering almost the inverse of the question, this is the correct answer
You can spend infinite money undermining infinite competitors but software companies live and die on industries and professionals being entrenched in their ecosystem
Pretending it’s a fictional scenario, asking the question in tech-oriented spaces such as Lemmy and Mastodon, then using some of the answers.
Buy the platforms open source projects use and…Wait a minute, MS already did this.
With the advent of AI open source is no longer a threat. Now it is just training data.
Nice try adobe.
I would start a bunch of supply chain attacks to erode the trust and drown them in ai generated “contributions” to make maintainers tired.
Pay a bunch of simps to make posts all over about how they tried switching to linux and/or GIMP but it was too hard and broke all the time, claiming that open source is “just a hobby.”
become a whisleblower, expose them?
get open source fans on the internet to endlessly discuss and fight amongst each other.
I know, totally unrealistic. would actually never happen, that’s ridiculous.
I would submit code I wrote to it
I think the best strategy is to contribute lots of money and work to promoting and developing free software, improving it and using it everywhere so that it comes to be ubiquitous, used by everyone. That will make it even more of a target for malware authors and therefore lead to its sure demise. We should get started right away.
I’d embezzle a bunch of the money, then spend the rest on good-faith contributions to the software in question, insisting that this was just stage 1 of the plan. There is no stage 2.
I can’t say you understood the assignment, but I can say you are good people. I mean… kinda. Embezzlement is a bit sketch.
Embezzlement is a bit sketch
Embezzlement from billion dollar corporations is a moral duty whenever the opportunity presents itself, so long as that embezzled money gets redistributed appropriately, Robin-Hood style.
Make arbitrary changes in your file formats every year that breaks any compatibility in as subtle ways as possible.
Fork it, carry on with being FOSS for now, develop a few killer features that everyone will love that would take a small FOSS team years to develop. When it becomes the industry standard, make it closed source. A year later start charging for it.
