I recently attended FOSDEM 2025, and was asked how it was I could possibly use Google Pay on my phone when I was clearly a vocal proponent of Free & Open-Source Software (FOSS). I said that believing in FOSS didn’t mean I needed to be uncompromising, and told a story about veganism.
Disclaimer: I don’t really know much about veganism. I try to live a low-meat diet. Don’t take anything in this post as an affront to veganism - any offence is very much not intended.
My sisters did Veganuary a few years back, and it stuck - they’re still vegans now. I didn’t know much about veganism, except that it was ’trendy’ at the time, so did a few online searches to learn more. Since it was sisters, I started with ‘vegan jokes’ - highly recommended. In my reading, I encountered the term ‘Level 5 Vegan’.
Veganism, like anything positive, can come with some element of competitive virtue signalling. Vegans can compete on who is even better for the planet or who cares for the animals even more. It starts with animals and their produce, onto leather shoes, then leather interiors in their cars, then onto whether the car tyres are made with with tallow. The peak of this is the Level 5 Vegan, who doesn’t consume anything that casts a shadow. Each increment along this ladder is a diminishing return - it’s inconvenient, requires research, and has a lower world benefit to the previous step up the ladder.
On the other hand, there’s the ‘chegan’. The cheating vegan. Instead of working their way up and up this broken ladder, they stick at the lower levels, and they occasionally indulge in the forbidden things. If a particular chegan, once a fortnight, has a cheeseburger, but also holds a conversation about veganism, they almost certainly do more world good than the Level 5 Vegan.
FOSS is the same. Being zero tolerance on closed source software isn’t doing nearly as much good as teaching friends and kids about the benefits of free and open source software. Getting other people to give up their closed walled ecosystems and mystery boxes does more for open source than shaving another few percentage points off their own usage. Talking to my kids about open source is a part of teaching my kids about values, and could well be the best thing I ever do for open-source.
I’ll absolutely use closed source where there isn’t an open source alternative. I’ll also use closed source if the open source alternative is disproportionately difficult or expensive (email hosting and LLMs spring to mind). But I’ll also live true to this sticker I found at FOSDEM:
I absolutely don’t judge folks who want to be more extreme in their usage of FOSS, any more than I think that vegans should eat more meat.