The average person is fine giving up their data and time in exchange for entertainment and convenience. Free software is good but it comes at the cost of time, you have to learn and be at least semi-competent with a terminal and/or Linux to truly use most FOSS stuff and it’s just beyond the average person. They either don’t have the interest, or don’t have the capability to learn it and for all intents and purposes those are fundamentally equivalent.
Honestly, nothing “bad” has happened to most people as a result of data harvesting. The Equifax breach got a ton of people, including hardcore privacy nerds. There’s just some stuff you can’t turn off to participate in modern society.
Only geeks seem to elevate a computer to some type of religious thing that should be more than just a tool. This is coming from someone who started coding in assembly in the 6th grade in 1986.
But in the year of our lord 2025 at 51, the computer and technology is just an enablement tool for me to accomplish something else or a means for me to trade my labor for money to support my addiction to food and shelter. I have a dozen things I would rather be doing after I get off of work than futz around with technology.
But as far as just getting it merged upstream is not that simple depending on who the maintainers are or the nature of the change.
I actually have an anecdote. I use to work at AWS Professional Services and I was on a a rag tag team maintaining and adding features to am open source project that started off as a code sample in blog post. But got more and more popular over time in its niche and added features.
It was so popular that when I left AWS, that the interviewer asked me what project I was most proud of and when I mentioned it, the questions basically stopped and they made me an offer two days later.
AWS has a lot open source initiatives and GitHub organizations. The easiest organization to release products in with the lowest overhead is AWS Samples.
https://github.com/aws-samples
The process to get approved is dead simple and once I knew the process, I was able to turn around getting my own code that was sanitized from customer projects in there in less than two days. I had eight of my own projects in there that I legally, ethically and with approval allowed me to take some of my code with me that I used across two other companies.
But back to the main point. This other project where I had commit rights, I could easily fork it, make modifications for a customer, submit my pull request after testing it and get it merged in within less than a month, as could a former coworker who was retired and made and submitted changes for some non profits who he was working with for free.
Then the project became so popular and more strategic for AWS that while it stayed open source, it was moved to be an “AWS Solution”.
https://github.com/aws-solutions
Even I who was still on the internal team at the time had to wait months and go through a series of justifications to get anything merged in to a release. I doubt now that even though I am still friends with the Principal Architect on the project among others could get a change merged in even though before I left I was still the third highest contributor because of all of the red tape.
On a happy note though. I saw what was going to happen before it got put under the AWS Solution group and I added as my last pull request an extension mechanism that allowed you to register Lambda extensions to extend the project without modifying the base code.
I mean you should pay for software and not depend on free work from the maintainers of open source software.