CyanogenMod, which was the base of most custom Android ROMs at one point. After taking venture funding, incompetent business majors crashed and burned the project trying to commercialize it. It was then forked and LineageOS was born.
DuckStation recently changed to a source-available license that prohibits distributing modified versions of the software and prohibits commercial use. Before, it was GPLv3.
Also OpenOffice, Emby, Audacity, Android (AOSP) (soft forked to LineageOS and GrapheneOS, but no hard fork)
Simple Mobile Tools -> Fossify Tools
Fixed minecraft(terrible name)->Harmony/Melody
Redis / Valkey
Maybe a bit niche, but if you're in the Scala ecosystem and seen what happened with Akka -> Apache Pekko. Version one of Pekko was a 1-1 rename of Akka
GNOME spawning 3 new DEs every time they have a major version update
Gitea, took control away from community and gave it to a for profit organization. Forgejo was born
It has been on my list to figure out how to move to forgejo, need to do it soon before the migration process breaks or gets awful.
I hope someone made STACER (a.k.a Bleachbit on roids) remastered
The owner of that project already abandoned it, it's sad STACER already had so....much potential compared to Bleachbit but no one wants to revive it
mysql -> mariaDB
Audacity was the first one I thought of.
Or MultiMC, PolyMC, the Sodium mod, or the original Minecraft Forge.
(Minecraft community devs need to stop having drama lmao)
What happened to the Sodium mod?
Wait, what happened to Multi MC? I still use it whenever the want to play modded Minecraft returns
I actually had to look it up as I couldn't remember why I made the first switch. PolyMC was forked from MultiMC after they dropped third-party modpack support. Then there was some drama with one of the devs of PolyMC, spawning Prism Launcher
I really don't understand why PolyMC forked... Multi MC still has several third party mod packs available
Wait, what happened to Audacity?
I believe they were bought by someone and eventually implemented some questionable practices. I don't remember the exact details, maybe someone else does.
It was opt-out telemetry IIRC
Wasnt it something about data collection?
It was, the company that bought out Audacity added a bunch of telemetry to it
Any good alternatives?
I have used this as a drop-in replacement, with no complaints.
I love how well the PolyMC -> PrismLauncher transition went. It’s great that the asshole owning it didn’t just spew transphobic hate, but also removed the contribution rights to all other people, leading them to immediately flock to an alternative.
Lately? Firefox...
It's Mozilla that's slowly enshittifying, Firefox itself is theoretically insulated from the worst decisions they could make, but those safeguards are going to be put to the test real soon I bet.
Well to that end chromium is still around and I'm sure there's deshittified builds of that floating around too but it is going to quickly become harder to find not shitty browsers the way things are going over at Mozilla.
The big problem is the browser engine at the heart of all browsers, all the FF or Chromium forks very rarely modify the core. When they do, it's minor stuff. That's why AFAIK not a single chromium fork is maintaining manifest v2 in defiance of Google.
If Mozilla goes full tilt enshittification, all the FF forks will suffer a similar fate, they'll make changes all over, custom interface, cool little features here and there etc; but they'll never make major changes to the core and that's assuming they keep the core open source. If they take the core closed source and the forks can no longer get upstream updates for it they'll wither and die
A browser engine is kinda like the Linux kernel, it's large, complex and takes a lot of time and effort to make and keep it usable. I've seen estimates that if we needed to start from scratch on the Linux kernel it'd take 2-4 years just to get something decently usable.
Browser engines are similar, Ladybird for example, is a new open source browser AND engine from scratch that's been in development for about 2 years, they're estimating to have something "generally usable" in 2026
Timelines change based on interest.
Servo is a new browser rendering engine in Rust - seems interesting and gathering steam.
Don't be too fatalistic - every time the corpos have come for the internet they have been circumvented. I don't see it stopping now - especially since people like us are tired of this brand of bullshit.
I try not to be, but attention does need to be called to it, and I see a lot of handwaving away in regards to Mozilla. People should be demanding more answers from them to at least delay enshittification a little to give more time to the alternatives like Ladybird and Servo to develop and refine for widespread usage
Which thanks for pointing me towards Servo, I missed that one lol, but I still don't think it has yet achieved feature parity with Gecko or Chromium
There is a point when throwing more ressources at a problem will not increase the speed.
Emby
why?
Here's a comment about it I made a few weeks back in the context of why Jellyfin came to be and why I only ever recommend Plex or Jellyfin
This is going to go back quite a ways, and much of my knowledge is old at this point so some details might be off.
~15 years ago Plex as we know it started out as an OSX fork of the 0G Xbox homebrew software XBMC (Later renamed Kodi (For those who don't know, XBMC was XBox Media Center and would turn the 0g Xbox into the cheapest Home Theater PC you could get at the time, man those were the days lol))
Plex was only briefly open source and then was quickly closed when they incorporated a year or so after they had something functional. They never made any promises about not charging or being open source or anything, so that's why I'm generally fine with Plex
Sometime around 2012ish Emby came along as THE open source alternative to Plex and things were good. MOST of it was supposed to stay open source as was promised. From the beginning they kept build scripts n such closed source, probably should have caught on them, but heh ya know hindsight and all that.
Then around 2014/5 they took it all closed source, relicensed it and introduced their paywall including locking away already existing features. This is what pissed me and many others off and this is when and why Jellyfin split off promising to be truly fully open source forever. (There was a ton of drama about it at the time, but it looks like Embys Q&A thing a bit back doesn't even bother to mention it, imagine that lol)
I don't have a problem with subscriptions on open source software myself, but the way they went about it...yea. fuck em
thanks for clarification :)
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