Will young developers take on key open source software?

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cly7n2jm5m5o

38 20 1 year ago

kazinator• 1 year 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.

StefanBatory2• 1 year 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."

mainecoder2• 1 year 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.

seper8• 1 year 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• 1 year ago

It’s true, open source doesn’t pay (usually) and millennials and younger are struggling to buy houses and just live.

nejsjsjsbsb• 1 year 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.

johnnyanmac2• 1 year ago

Sad but true. I was planning to start trying to commit to some OS last year... but the lack of luck in the Job market put that to a pause.

I need to make sure I can pay off my debt before having a clear mind to focus on being a part of an effort bigger than myself.

SR2Z2• 1 year ago

lol Gen Z is wealthier at this point in their lives than every preceding generation was and not even by a small margin

mainecoder2• 1 year ago

A portion of GenZ is wealthier than any generation of upper class ever. This is the most unequal generation in terms of wealth and education(people who submit papers on additive number theory in high school while the others have a 4th grade reading comprehension and a few thousand followers on tiktok).

pjmlp• 1 year 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• 1 year 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• 1 year 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• 1 year 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• 1 year ago

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

Will young developers take on key open source software?

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