Why are there so many graybeards in FOSS?
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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.
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There’s no denial that money has a huge role on it, especially because open source software has contributions mostly from North America and Western Europe.
But about older guys being more available, I wouldn’t be so sure. That would be a nice case to study. Because the older you get, often the less inclined you are to spend your free time on something like that.
I believe what happens with these people is that the projects are truly their passion, and they come from a different landscape where software development wasn’t something mainstream. I remember some comment on HN where the user talked about how there was a “coolness” to it in the sense of being something new and unexplored, the internet was a place for like-minded people that loved information technology, they had the chance to create a lot of things that have become established today.
Now software development isn’t the same as it used to be in general perception, I guess. The influx of capital that made the startup scene boom and made everyone and their grandmother to learn to code sucked out part of the passion from the field. Nowadays you have a lot of professional programmers who don’t know anything beyond their immediate IDE and programming language. There isn’t a sense of discovery any more, cause it feels like any project is a copycat (another todo app), while the important projects have grown super complex and are managed by organizations instead of lone programmers.
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The current tech industry has taken a hard right turn. While there are of course many standout foss contributors and many come up every day, the vast majority of people in tech have no qualms about waking up, destroying privacy at Facebook, and having a beer after work with friends and ignoring society. Silicon valley is "fuck you got mine" on an industrial scale.
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I hope you figure out how to set boundaries. 60 hours of working time is 8 am to 8 pm 6 days per week. You should be aiming for 35 if you can (9-5, x5)
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Tech companies spend effort on a FOSS project when either it's their main product, or when they have no choice, it's licensed under GPL and there are no BSD or Apache-licensed alternatives. Contributions are usually done by individual employees in their after-hours time, and most managers see it as directly benefitting their competition.
