Another way to look at it is as part of a major, unremarked change in society:<p>A couple years ago I was talking to someone who came of age since 2016, when I think many of these changes began moving rapidly. When I said something about a community project, they ridiculed the idea that people could and would come together and do good, productive things. I used FOSS as an example, and also of course, democracy.<p>The lack of social trust is a well-known concept, but I don't know if people see the massive change where instead of defaulting to trust, the default is paranoia and also being distrustful - scamming others ('animal spirits', as Jamie Dimon calls them). It's also ridiculing, like my friend, the idea of democracy - for example, the popular notion that doing anything to stand up to power, especially organized protests, is pointless. The briefest glance at history shows otherwise, but of course fact & reason are not the mode of analysis these days. <i>Cui bono?</i> People who have capital and power; people who want to take down the power of the people and democracy.<p>If you look at FOSS from the usual humanistic democratic perspective, with social trust (which is part of human nature, despite attempts to destroy it) - that free people generally do good and well and can self-organize, and that now the Internet provides a way for them to do all that easily - then these big coordinated FOSS projects are a happy thing and make sense.<p>But if you look at it from the current madness, the paranoia and hate, then FOSS becomes suspect. Without social trust, how could such an organization work? Only an organization controlled by a powerful person could acheives something. Think about it: why is the latter type of organization more likely to work than the former?