Most of the technology you rely on every day is getting worse on purpose.

There is a word for it now: enshittification. A platform wins you over, locks you in, then quietly tightens the screws. Worse terms, more ads, fewer controls, until the product exists to extract from you rather than serve you. The biggest companies are doing this to their own users, and most people have nowhere else to go.

That is exactly why independent, open-source projects are not a luxury. They are the immune system of a healthy tech ecosystem. When one company owns the operating system, the chip, the cloud, and the rules, your only real freedom is that a credible alternative still exists — one that answers to its community instead of a quarterly number.

Parrot Security is one of those alternatives, and it just proved the point. It became the first penetration-testing distribution to support RISC-V, the open processor architecture anyone can build on without asking a gatekeeper for permission.

A chip that anyone can build is only as good as the tools willing to run on it. Parrot did the dull, necessary work to make them run. In a world consolidating around a handful of owners, backing open foundations like this matters more than it ever has.

A better internet will not come from the companies squeezing us. It will come from the independent projects that refuse to. Support the ones you depend on, while they are still here.