Why are there so many graybeards in FOSS?
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Extra Upvote
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because young devs are treating their careers as careers. nothing wrong with that.
us "greybeards" treat it as a hobby and a career.
IMO software development will be dead in 20 years when the "greybeards" retire and there's going to be a HUGE brain drain on older tech that the younger generation refuse to work on because it doesn't further their career.
think of it to something akin to doctors who heal for the pay and not to help people.
I solve problems with software because I seek the challenge. I haven't seen that kind of objective from younger engineers.
If I was between my 20s-40s right now I would be learning COBOL and FORTRAN. going to be a lot of demand in the next few years around that for US civil infrastructure.
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Nobody here was arguing that they don't.
The entire reason I even began commenting on this thread is because someone said this.
teens are not geeking around with computers, they are watching reels and scrolling recommendations and doing other bullshit
My entire argument the whole time has been that back in the day, plenty of kids weren't doing computing related things. Plenty were doing "other bullshit" back then. My point has been the same the entire time. Just because computing as a hobby has a lower barrier to entry doesn't mean that there are less people overall interested in learning more. You just keep repeating back to me that proportionally less people who use computers today really know them deeply. I've never said anything otherwise. I jist see no reason to believe that as a whole there are less people who want to know them on a deeper level.
You point out things like files being a difficult concept for younger people today because it's been abstracted away. My response to that would be merely knowing what a file is was never what we've been talking about. Of millennials, what percentage knows about files and how to save them? 99% or so? Just a guess, it doesn't really matter the exact number. Do you believe 99% of millennials are tech geniuses on the way to becoming "FOSS graybeards"? No! Of course not! Basic computer usage has always been a different skill set than what I've been talking about.
Unless you have some sort of data about the amount of young people going into things like computer science is substantially lower today than it was in the '80s then I see no reason to believe otherwise. We live in a golden age of cheap electronics and easily accessible information. The barrier to entry for curious people wanting to learn more about computers than having them act as basic machines that can make documents, edit pictures, and play games is arguably lower than ever.
The days of old required everyone to learn more to be able to use computers, but I don't believe this translated to more experienced people then than today overall, especially not more people willing to contribute back to the community back then than today.
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Yeah. Extremely good software engineers can easy demand $200/hour as a contractor and that's still considered low. They are essentially doing that much worth of work for free.
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A lot of FOSS development isn’t rich developers donating their free time, it’s paid developers who were hired by their company to work on an open source project the company deems crucial to their business.
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Why do young people pop into a community that has been around for decades and wonder why the old people who built it are still around?
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The problem the article highlights is not the considerable amount of "graybeards," but the lack of everyone else.
to have a bigger part of that pie, then have more of them jump in.
The problem is: how?
I personally enjoy working with open source projects because I like making code to help other people. But, apparently, that's not enough of an incentive for other people.
Or, of course, they don't have the time/resources
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And what is the problem with that?
You don’t think that’s a problem that most essential open source software is maintained by older people who will retire sooner than later?
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I feel like by the time Trump and elin and the project 2025 gang have finished having their way with the government there won't be any demand for COBOL or FORTRAN. It'll all have been burned down to the ground.
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At lot of this strikes me as non-issues, or even bordering on entitlement.
Well, for instance, if you're contributing your own code, there is a high bar to clear. It often feels as if you need to surpass whatever the existing functionality is. Just to get accepted, you have to offer something better than some existing product that may have been around for decades.
Well, no kidding, that's how it works in most things. Why would a project accept a contribution that doesn't add a previously missing feature or improve on the implementation of a current one? I would be pretty suspect of using a program that accepts a random commit so that a college kid can check the "Timmy's first accepted pull request" box and let them pad their resume.
Some would-be contributors are very familiar with programming, reading, and writing code, but they may never have opened an issue or sent a pull request. This is a scary first step. Others may have the necessary tech skills, but not the creativity. Where should they you begin? Also, if someone is scared, that can result in impostor syndrome. The fear that people all over the world will see your bad code is a powerful factor reducing the urge to share it.
These are all things that the greybeards being maligned had to figure out at some point, I don't really see the harm in new contributors being expected to do the same, especially when there is an abundance of documentation and tutorials available now, which simply didn't exist in the past.
For instance, there are a lot of folks doing mods for video games. This can be a very creative activity, there is lots of room for innovation, as well as outlets such as streaming to reach an audience. It applies to all sorts of games, such as Pokémon, Elder Scrolls, and Minecraft. Game modding is a great way in. It could even be a way to set up a company, or to make a living. But it's not considered as FOSS. For novices getting interested, it could even be attracting people away from getting into FOSS development.
Again, nothing new here. No, game mods weren't nearly as prevalent in the past, but new devs have had the choice between contributing to FOSS software and contributing to/creating proprietary programs for as long as FOSS has been a thing.
I don't think the old guard should be dismissive or rude to newcomers when their contributions aren't up to the standard expected to be accepted, but they also aren't getting paid to be these peoples' mentors. It kind of reminds me of posts I see in language learning communities, where people would get all upset, "I completed the Duolingo Spanish tree, but the cashiers at my local Mexican restaurant speak too fast for me to understand and they switch to English when I try to talk to them in Spanish." Cool that you want to try and use the language, my friend, but these people aren't being paid to be your tutor, and you may well be making their job more difficult and/or holding up other paying customers by trying to force random people to listen to your extremely basic, and likely incorrect, Spanish. They don't have an obligation to put everything else in their work or life on hold to try and stroke your ego.
Curiously, I don't see any mention of what, in my view, is likely a much more serious issue to getting new generations of contributors involved, as well as having a more diverse set of contributors. Access to technology and relevant education is far from uniform. If little Timmy from Greenwich, CT has had a personal computer he was free to mess around with to his heart's content from the moment he could read and attended a well-funded school with the possibility of studying computers, programming, and early exposure to things like Linux from grade school onwards, it shouldn't come as any surprise that he's more comfortable working with these concepts and more likely to wind up contributing successfully to FOSS projects than my friend Lucas, in Brazil, who only got a second-hand computer when he managed to get accepted to university, and had no real concept of Linux/FOSS until I explained to him why I couldn't just install a random, Windows-only program he thought would be useful to me.
To draw another language learning comparison, it's like how in the US, most students will only study a second language for a couple of years in high school and two semesters at university, if they attend higher education, and then you periodically have people going, "How come so many Americans fail to speak a second language compared to students in Europe?" Then, you look at the curriculum in countries like Germany, and realize they begin teaching students English as early as grade-school, often adding another foreign language later on. Is it any surprise that, when they have nearly a decade of foreign language instruction, compared to the mere two years many Americans get, alongside a fair bit more exposure to and encouragement of engaging with foreign language media, that they wind up being more proficient at using said language on average?
It's hardly a perfect solution that will completely mitigate all of the issues with getting younger and more diverse groups of people to contribute to FOSS projects, but I don't doubt that having access to computers in the home from a young age and access to more extensive education on computers and related fields from a much younger age would go a long way towards getting more people involved. Of course, even then, having the downtime to be able to dedicate to contributing to/maintaining FOSS projects is a factor that will disproportionately favor historically privileged groups. Even if she has the knowledge and ability to do so, a single mother working three jobs in the Bronx in order to keep a roof over her family's head, food on the table, and the lights and heating on simply might choose not to spend what little free time she has writing a badass new MPD client in Rust that has plugins to integrate with Lidarr and automatically fix metadata with beets based on matching the hashes of files to releases on various trackers in order to scrape the release data from them, no matter how cool the concept might sound to her. And it's not really something I could blame her for.
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Yes, but I would point out that:
a) a bunch of those commercially supported Foss projects still started out as a personal project of one of a small handful of programmers that then got popular and exploded.
b) more importantly yes, a lot of commercially useful FOSS is developed by paid developers working at tech companies as part of their line of work, stuff like browsers, languages, frameworks, packages, etc. but a lot of the most jconic and beloved consumer facing FOSS applications are not as it's harder to monetize at that point since you're not building on top of those projects.
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When I got into the business in the late 1970s, there was strong selective pressure in favor of people being capable and smart. Back then, software didn't offer a lucrative career path for people with good memories, conformist instincts and a superficial command of MBA jargon. The people who had coding jobs and who didn't wash out had it in their blood. There were lots of bullshitters, just as there are now, but they failed rapidly and were driven out.
I'm a bit younger than the OG greybeards (and a lot younger than people like Don Knuth). I've been in the business for longer than most coders have been alive. During that time, I've reskilled more times than I can count, and I still write code, though it's mainly prototype and proof-of-concept stuff at this stage in my career, when the development team gets stuck.
And that's the thing: I'm not there to block new people from submitting pull requests. I'm there to help get the job done. If you find the whole process opaque and need mentoring, just ask.
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I agree sorta. servers will still be there, but nobody will know how to turn them on and run them.
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Because people who have been around in FOSS since the 70s and 80s are the most dedicated toward it and tend to fund it more.
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got laid off but were relatively wealthy enough to not have massive pressure to immediately start grinding a 9-5 again
Or they were grinding 996 to get something noteworthy and impressive on thier cv so they could get another good job and quit whatever it was they had to pick up to pay the bills in the mean time...
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Because older men tend to be more financially secure and hence have more time for generosity.
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Retirement and open source contribution sounds like an excellent combination to me. Give the old men something to do, let the projects be worked on by people who can take their time, make the best use of the expertise. All that sounds great.
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Idk. As an engineer that already works 60 hours a week, the last thing I want to do with my remaining free time is spend more time in front of my computer on another project working for free. Not to mention, most engineers sign a lot of bullshit legal paperwork stipulating that their employer owns all the code they write, even in their free time, which makes it hard to get involved.
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We got extended memory now! Bill gates doesn't know what he's talking about.
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It's why there was a huge FOSS boom after the dot com crash when a ton of software engineers suddenly got laid off
I’d be interested in a source on that.
