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For many years, I dreamed of bug-free software.

"message not decrypted" (matrix)

"we just lost three hours of work to a sync bug" (cryptpad)

"our website is now replaced with a bitcoin miner" (wordpress)

It's become a sort of commonplace view among activists I know, that that's the price you pay for your sugar-free open source — and if you want it to be bug-free you need the corporate stuff.

I appreciate that in the atproto community, many consider this dichotomy a bit reductionist. Some corporate software works better and worse than others, and the same with open source. Working towards a cambrian explosion of beautiful pluralistic software that works well and isn't extractive either.

This is not a wish for software heroism, but a journal of a chronically ill person's interest in how care and pragmatism are not always opposites.

If we talk about "the software freedoms", we could consider it a precondition for the 0th software freedom that the software works in the first place, before you can use it "as you wish".