6 ms·

Will young developers take on key open source software?

kazinator 2y ago
> “You've got a next generation who haven't engaged as a philanthropic community and volunteer community in the same way, at the same scale.” That's basically a kind way of saying that they mock the crazy old guy who shakes his fists at the cloud, and mumbles something about Microsoft and Google.
- StefanBatory 2y ago
  At my university, I remember having obligatory "volunteer" hours. I remember doing my internship unpaid. While I know that's how things simply are, I imagine in current climate it'd put off a lot of people away from anything that resembles volunteering. "If you're good at something, never do it for free."
  - mainecoder 2y ago
    Actually it's that inflation and cost of living has squeezed people so much that volunteering and prestigious low paid internships/ unpaid internships are mostly done by people from affluent backgrounds where as back in the day the middle class was the rich of today.
    - StefanBatory 2y ago
      Also, the volunteering stuff we had was mostly related to helping uni organise events and so on. So we were unpaid labor.
seper8 2y ago
Young people are too busy with being blasted in the ass financially to focus on hobby side projects. Boomers pulled up the ladder and now they're wondering why noone is climbing up.
- notyourwork 2y ago
  It’s true, open source doesn’t pay (usually) and millennials and younger are struggling to buy houses and just live.
  - nejsjsjsbsb 2y ago
    Not only does it not pay but the impact is a lot lower. Can you make an editor anything like VSCode or a cache like Redis? The bar is sky high and for zero dollars it ain't worth it for most.
    - johnnyanmac 2y ago
      I don't think it needs to be sky high. The first story on here was one of a person who just basically wrapped a bunch of transfer protocols into one commend (yes, I'm severely underplaying the time and effort involved). But I suppose it depends on what sort or magnitude of impact you want to make on the scene.
    - trod1234 2y ago
      Well in many ways its a deceitfully clever way to extract slave labor of the disenfranchised. Its an unpopular view but most of FOSS getting to the point of adoption that its at today was largely a reaction to monopolies, barriers of entry, and bad software alternatives whose cost was price gouging. Build an OSS software suite as a company, solicit free labor, get bought out, take it private and reap the reward of money printing. Knowing this cycle is a reality, as opposed to just someone saying it can theoretically happen, who would ever contribute when they aren't paid? There are plenty of competent and skilled people today who are out of work, and can't feed themselves without government assistance.
    - hulitu 2y ago
      > . Can you make an editor anything like VSCode or a cache like Redis? No, but you can make a video player like MPlayer, a video library like ffmpeg, an image viewer like xv (not technically open source but close), a widget library like GTK1, an operating system, and so on and so forth. There is a lot of useful software which started as a one man show.
pjmlp 2y ago
Of course not, they have not lived through BSD and GNU adoption, building home computers at home collecting pieces. They have not lived through the days that pirated software was common, as most folks would not have income to pay for every single piece of software on their computers. They have grown up with disposable computing devices, where OEMs have gone back to pre-PC revolution, where to get an OS upgrade one would get a new computer, and all peripherals were external, USB ports replacing parallel ports, as means to get those margins pre-clone wars back, using software with microtransactions. Additionally people have realised that FOOS without income doesn't scale, and we're back to Shareware by another name, with incentives to turn them into VC sponsored unicorns, something that we didn't have back in the day, getting some money to get by was already good enough. After my generation is gone, so are all FOSS founders, and like every movent in human history, it will be replaced by something else.
netdevphoenix 2y ago
As sad as it might seem, this will be good reality check for companies of all sizes to start contributing to the open source ecosystem they take so much from. Either that or I foresee the rise of some stewarding group balancing the vampires with the contributors (ie. you gotta contribute a relative minimum to feed from the ecosystem). The current state of open source is not sustainable anyway judging by the stories of burn out contributors and most companies are just used to having so much free stuff available that they don't even consider paying back or where the free stuff comes from until vulnerabilities start to increase in abandoned packages with no alternatives beyond fronting an insane amount of dev time to write a replacement or fork the project
alpaccount 2y ago
Yes, via FAANG jobs lol. That's one of the few realistic ways young people nowadays can afford to spend a considerable amount of time learning the ins and outs of very complex OSS
oldguyyelling25 2y ago
My impression is that a lot of younger people see working with open source projects in their spare time primarily as a way to do self promotion, in order to get good jobs and grow their networks.
bergie 2y ago
Why would they. Majority of open source is just enabling the big players to produce software a little bit faster.

> “You've got a next generation who haven't engaged as a philanthropic community and volunteer community in the same way, at the same scale.” That's basically a kind way of saying that they mock the crazy old guy who shakes his fists at the cloud, and mumbles something about Microsoft and Google.

StefanBatory 2y ago
At my university, I remember having obligatory "volunteer" hours. I remember doing my internship unpaid. While I know that's how things simply are, I imagine in current climate it'd put off a lot of people away from anything that resembles volunteering. "If you're good at something, never do it for free."
- mainecoder 2y ago
  Actually it's that inflation and cost of living has squeezed people so much that volunteering and prestigious low paid internships/ unpaid internships are mostly done by people from affluent backgrounds where as back in the day the middle class was the rich of today.
  - StefanBatory 2y ago
    Also, the volunteering stuff we had was mostly related to helping uni organise events and so on. So we were unpaid labor.

seper8 2y ago

Young people are too busy with being blasted in the ass financially to focus on hobby side projects. Boomers pulled up the ladder and now they're wondering why noone is climbing up.

notyourwork 2y ago
It’s true, open source doesn’t pay (usually) and millennials and younger are struggling to buy houses and just live.
- nejsjsjsbsb 2y ago
  Not only does it not pay but the impact is a lot lower. Can you make an editor anything like VSCode or a cache like Redis? The bar is sky high and for zero dollars it ain't worth it for most.
  - johnnyanmac 2y ago
    I don't think it needs to be sky high. The first story on here was one of a person who just basically wrapped a bunch of transfer protocols into one commend (yes, I'm severely underplaying the time and effort involved). But I suppose it depends on what sort or magnitude of impact you want to make on the scene.
  - trod1234 2y ago
    Well in many ways its a deceitfully clever way to extract slave labor of the disenfranchised. Its an unpopular view but most of FOSS getting to the point of adoption that its at today was largely a reaction to monopolies, barriers of entry, and bad software alternatives whose cost was price gouging. Build an OSS software suite as a company, solicit free labor, get bought out, take it private and reap the reward of money printing. Knowing this cycle is a reality, as opposed to just someone saying it can theoretically happen, who would ever contribute when they aren't paid? There are plenty of competent and skilled people today who are out of work, and can't feed themselves without government assistance.
  - hulitu 2y ago
    > . Can you make an editor anything like VSCode or a cache like Redis? No, but you can make a video player like MPlayer, a video library like ffmpeg, an image viewer like xv (not technically open source but close), a widget library like GTK1, an operating system, and so on and so forth. There is a lot of useful software which started as a one man show.

pjmlp 2y ago

Of course not, they have not lived through BSD and GNU adoption, building home computers at home collecting pieces. They have not lived through the days that pirated software was common, as most folks would not have income to pay for every single piece of software on their computers. They have grown up with disposable computing devices, where OEMs have gone back to pre-PC revolution, where to get an OS upgrade one would get a new computer, and all peripherals were external, USB ports replacing parallel ports, as means to get those margins pre-clone wars back, using software with microtransactions. Additionally people have realised that FOOS without income doesn't scale, and we're back to Shareware by another name, with incentives to turn them into VC sponsored unicorns, something that we didn't have back in the day, getting some money to get by was already good enough. After my generation is gone, so are all FOSS founders, and like every movent in human history, it will be replaced by something else.

netdevphoenix 2y ago

As sad as it might seem, this will be good reality check for companies of all sizes to start contributing to the open source ecosystem they take so much from. Either that or I foresee the rise of some stewarding group balancing the vampires with the contributors (ie. you gotta contribute a relative minimum to feed from the ecosystem). The current state of open source is not sustainable anyway judging by the stories of burn out contributors and most companies are just used to having so much free stuff available that they don't even consider paying back or where the free stuff comes from until vulnerabilities start to increase in abandoned packages with no alternatives beyond fronting an insane amount of dev time to write a replacement or fork the project

alpaccount 2y ago

Yes, via FAANG jobs lol. That's one of the few realistic ways young people nowadays can afford to spend a considerable amount of time learning the ins and outs of very complex OSS

oldguyyelling25 2y ago

My impression is that a lot of younger people see working with open source projects in their spare time primarily as a way to do self promotion, in order to get good jobs and grow their networks.

bergie 2y ago

Why would they. Majority of open source is just enabling the big players to produce software a little bit faster.