welcome to open sauce

On a recent Comedy Bang! Bang! live episode ^[1], Paul F. Tompkins ^[2] said “Isn't it weird how Adobe is just a thing we're all forced to use? There's no alternative at all. [...] Got to pay for it." It's a throwaway joke that made me realise the extent to which we all feel imprisoned by technology: everyone feels like they need to pay for a subscription to Adobe Creative Cloud to have Adobe Photoshop; everyone feels like they need Microsoft Office applications on their laptop; everyone feels like they need to buy the latest iPhone that Apple bring out and then pay for a decent podcast app to listen to their favourite LA alternative comedy podcast. Instead of liberating us, technology has imprisoned us and trapped us in payment plans and subscriptions to software tools that we feel have no alternative.

It’s easy to see why we feel trapped. Corporate proprietary software is monolithic (and monopolistic). It comes pre-packaged on your Windows PC, your MacBook, or your smartphone. The brand names of proprietary software become verbs like ‘photoshop’ or ‘google’. We’re trapped on an internet that corporations gradually colonised.

Even if you’re aware that there must be alternatives to programs like Adobe Photoshop and Microsoft Word out there, they’re difficult to find. Searching for e.g. ‘open source alternative to photoshop’ turns up hundreds of listicles that are either LLM-generated clickbait or that launder smaller proprietary products through openwashing by pretending a 30-day free trial is equivalent to being a free and open source alternative. Using open source is the most liberatory option but often not the easiest option.

And so this is a newsletter that will help you liberate your digital life from its technological prison. My name is Simon Bowie and I’m an open source developer who has worked on several open source projects in UK Higher Education. I’ve literally had the words ‘open source’ in a few of the job titles I’ve held over the years ^[3]. I run my own server where I host my own open source websites and several open source applications that I’ve used to replace expensive proprietary subscriptions.

Open source software is poorly understood and I aim to provide some insight on the advantages of going open source, the cost of using open source software, and a guide to what open source alternatives are available.

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