A funny thing I’ve noticed about trust in software is that it’s rarely based on evidence. Most of us learn what to trust the same way we learn how to “fit in”: by watching what gets praised, what gets mocked, and what’s considered “normal”. In other words, we trust whatever’s most “popular”.
When social pressure becomes the arbitrator, popularity starts to feel like proof, and anything unfamiliar starts to feel risky. I see this in my day-to-day work and while casually browsing tech content on social media. It makes me wonder: do we ever stop to question why we choose one piece of software, or reject another?
If trust can be trained into us, how often are we trusting (or distrusting) the wrong thing?
Tech Insight: Software trust is often a product of social engineering
Recently, I watched a YouTube Short that framed a real-life incident as an argument against open-source: a developer pulling a small, but widely used JavaScript package from the npm registry in protest after a dispute with a large company. Builds broke across the ecosystem, including for some of the world’s largest companies. npm later restored the library.
Somehow, this creator twisted the story into an intellectual pretzel, weaving between the narrative that “open-source bad” because:
- A random company claimed a developer’s code as their own.
- npm restored the library that the developer took down.
- Some people use similar attack vectors in code distribution platforms.
- Unethical developers can introduce backdoors.
There’s one small problem with this framing: none of these points have anything to do with the open-source model. Yet, the video’s already gained over 140 000 views and generated comments ranging from the informed and incredulous to the ignorant and misled. It mirrors a social pattern I see repeated across the internet daily:
- A large creator makes a claim against a software model.
- The public absorbs the idea (often without interrogating the claim).
- The idea gains validation.
- In the eyes of the public, validation becomes truth.
That right there’s classic social engineering, even when it isn’t deliberate. Most creators who do this don’t “have beef” with open source. They’re just telling a story that feels clean, dramatic, and shareable.
But when this becomes a swell tide of “monkey see, monkey do” mentalities, you can see how it swings the collective consciousness. Once that distrust becomes cultural, it becomes self-sustaining: people stop trying anything they associate with the ostensible “bad thing”, and organisations stop considering it (even while quietly benefiting from it). The “professional” choice becomes the popular one, and whatever’s “professional” becomes even more popular.
Marketing doesn’t need to convince everyone. It only needs to define what’s socially acceptable. Ironically, that same swell-tide can swing in the other direction as well, which is why…
Open-source is having a moment right now
Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ve probably heard it by now in some form — and people are pretty fed up with the dominant companies and systems in tech. What’s interesting is how clearly this shows up in “popular stats counter” culture. StatCounter-based reporting showed Linux’s desktop share rising from 3.12% in 2023 to 4.45% in 2024. And on StatCounter’s own pages more recently, Linux sits at 3.86% worldwide (December 2025) and 5.28% in the US (December 2025).
These numbers move around (they’re measuring web activity, not a perfect census of devices), but the point is simpler: the public conversation has shifted, and “Linux/open source” is no longer automatically treated as a punchline.
Again, it’s an ironic twist of fate: the same social pressures that made people learn to think “open-source/Linux bad” are now bending in the opposite direction, because the largest voices are switching up their game. It may not be a conscious, deliberate effort for everyone (except maybe Valve with SteamOS, of course), but once that ball starts rolling, it’s pretty much impossible to stop it.
Here’s what I’ve published recently:
It’s FOSS
- I Ran the Famed Affinity Designer on Linux. Here’s How It Went
A practical look at what works, what does not, and what it says about compatibility.
LWN
- An early look at the Graphite 2D graphics editor
A look at Graphite’s ambition to bring a node-based, non-destructive workflow to 2D graphics.
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