I feel like there’s maybe also a bit of disappointment in open-source going around? The last few years have shown that it’s not the silver bullet, it was thought to be.
Companies will find ways to relicense contributions via CLAs, or to just straight up violate your copyright with GenAI. And even projects that technically tick all the open-source boxes, like Chromium and parts of Android, can and do exert plenty control over users, because no one has the manpower to fork them.
Then there’s plenty unethical companies making use of open-source, and they rarely contribute back to make up for it.
Nevermind that the open-source infrastructure is owned by corporations (GitHub, Discord etc.).And it feels ever more present to me that publishing things as open-source means maintenance work, which can quickly lead to burnout. People just expect you to provide updates, no matter what your license text says.
Like, I certainly don’t either think that not doing open-source is any closer to a solution. But I’m finally at a point where I feel like my code is useful and good enough to publish, and it just feels like either my only ‘users’ are corporations scraping my code, or if I promote it, then it’s just a ton of maintenance work waiting for me.
I don’t know, maybe that’s also just a me-problem…Multiple things:
- get rid of mandatory mailinglists
- use a modern git flow without emails
- get the hell off of discord
- don’t make me a “maintainer”. I write code, I love it. Don’t Peter Principle me
- pay me if I’m supposed to care
The goddamn Linux Foundation is investing more into AI than friggin Linux. They could be hiring hundreds of staff to work on Linux with the billions they shove unto AI. What the fuck are they doing? Mozilla is another offender.
Open source foundations with money should be using it to develop open source.
Also, on greybeard conferences: allow virtual participation please? My company isn’t going to give me 4 days off to travel somewhere for one day, have a 2 day conference, then take another day to get back. Nor am I going to pay 200+€ or something as an entrance fee on top of my ticket halfway around the world.
Ironically, I think it’s the younger ones the ones pushing for discord the most. Some projects opened a discord because it actually made it more attractive to young people.
The question is how to make an open source alternative more attractive.
If you look at projects in more popular languages like JS, Rust, Python. There is plenty of new blood in the contributors list. I won’t speculate as to why, but it looks like the new generation doesn’t like c and c++.
I think this is also backed up by the Linux kernel and thunderbird projects. Both are old c/c++ codebases and both have stated they are adopting rust in hopes of drawing interest (and contributors) from the rust community.
I won’t speculate as to why, but it looks like the new generation doesn’t like c and c++.
It’s not that hard to know why - these languages have footguns literally everywhere. They seem simple and powerful at first, but they turn into a monster soon enough. There are simply objectively better alternatives today, like Rust. It shouldn’t be surprising, it’s been so many decades after all.
Young people today are struggling to make ends meet - they don’t have enough comfort and free time to be able to donate their labor.
God it’s not even that, the general tech knowledge has just plowed into the ground
That’s true, but that’s also just the general populous, who weren’t ever contributing to open source anyways.
I don’t think the quality of coders (professional or hobby) has really declined that much.oh it definitely has. I’ve been in the industry since last century, the actual poke everything, do this for fun, invest yourself, wild jockey type…well we’re a dying breed.
I don’t see a reduced number of CS students that enjoy poking around. I see an increase in the number of students that are there only for the good salary. Making the poking type into a smaller percentage.
Our civilization demands that I be profitable to a parasite who leeches a majority of my labour’s value in order to accumulate obscene levels of wealth.
Without exorbitant amounts of time spent maintaining that profitability, I will end up poor, homeless, and eventually dead from exposure. This leaves vanishingly little time to spend on open source work, regardless of how intellectually and ethically attractive it may be.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
True, the Linux Foundation events all now come with child support for young parents, but my expert guestimate is the average age is still well into the 30s.
More specifically, the Cloud Native Computing Foundations (CNCF)'s KubeCons have many tracks for people who want to learn the ins and outs of Kubernetes and other cloud-native programs.
The OSPO for Good conference proposed solutions that have been suggested before, such as hackathons, to engage young developers in open source coding.
As David Nalley, president of the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) and director of open source strategy at Amazon Web Services (AWS), said at the conference: "Getting people to maintain old code isn’t easy.
… I thought if I could hold on just a bit longer, I could help maintain the focus on long term development to improve the user experience.
She also runs the LFX Mentorship program, which seeks to sponsor and train the next generation of open source developers and leaders.
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