Why are there so many graybeards in FOSS?
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I can barely be trusted with shoe laces these days tbh
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I disagree with your idea of real world turbulence affecting it. Things were going the wrong way even in 2005. Dotcom bubble, Iraq war, those things - maybe.
I actually think that USSR's breakup is what long-term caused how our world has become worse.
Say, in terms of computers and mass culture too, they sometimes treat the 90s as a result of that breakup, but that doesn't quite make sense, despite a few armed conflicts, it was a gradual process, CIS as an organization was treated as almost a new union in making even in my childhood.
That breakup has released a lot of dirty money into the world, and through not the cleanest people in western countries, too.
And ideologically - the optimist version of the Cold War ending was some syncretic version of the "western" and the "eastern" promises for the space-faring united future. And much of the 90s was about, often dystopian, but fantasies in the context of such an utopia.
IRL both optimist promises were forgotten. Thus the current reality.
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Wow you are way off time wise, I spoke of the 70's and 80's. Everything you mention is AFTER that.
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I'm really confused by your reasoning here. You're describing how it was extremely difficult to you and you had to go to great lengths to learn technology. Not everyone did this back then not does everyone do it now.
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People born in the 50s have long retired. The grey beards are not baby-boomers. They are people born in the late 60s and 70s. They are people who grew up as computing technology matured. They started coding low level and had careers building the infrastructure of computing which is what a lot of FOSS is.
However the question is not why these people have aged? It's why hasn't there been a steady stream of people taking their place from younger generations?
I believe it's because the generations after them have careers working at higher levels of abstraction. Often going lower level is seen as black magic that is unknown to them.
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Elastic shoelaces. Game changer.
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Wow you are way off time wise, I spoke of the 70’s and 80’s. Everything you mention is AFTER that.
I meant the "peace with Russia" part by that, sorry.
The Foss idea is early 80’s and EFF was created in the mid 80’s, and as I mentioned, based on the ideology of the 70’s.
Meant that exactly, that (in my perception) there's something similar in that ideology with science fiction of the same time, cinema, electronic music, industrial design and general techno-optimism. Some kind of universalism, like in Asimov's Foundation.
Unfortunately Putin completely ruined that after he came to power in 1991, which is also around the time Linux started.
1999, 1991 is Yeltsin, but one is a logical continuation of the other (many Russian liberals disagree, love Yeltsin and hate Putin, don't listen to them).
The turnaround was after Carter when Reagan was elected, not just in USA, but also in most of Europe.
Perhaps ; here I'm too ignorant.
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I think this is also a problem of old timers not being able to articulate their concerns well. There is probably a reason they do or don't do something a certain way, but if they can't explain why, then no one is going to listen. Blindly following someone for percieved wisdom doesn't teach you anything.
I actually like it when someone can show me why I'm wrong, because it saves me time. But if you can't tell me WHY my idea won't work, I'm probably just gunna do it anyway to figure it out myself.
I think this is as much a case of bad teachers as it is bad students.
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Greybeards, like in Skyrim you mean?
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It's ultimately a question of money. Older guys with software engineering degrees and fancy salaries can spend their weekends doing free community service in the form of open-source development. Younger people have to worry about job and rent and bills, they simply don't have that kind of free time.
Add to that the growing complexity of the software. Something that could be done by an university student before, like writing an OS from scratch, won't be nearly as useful as it would in the '90-s, because it was already done before, now you have multiple OSes to choose from. And joining an existing software project is hit-or-miss, some are inclusive and some are an old boy club where you need to know the secret rules.
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Yup. I did a fair amount of FOSS in school to build a resume, then I started a career, got married, and had kids, so now I don't do much. I plan to do more when the kids get older, but I currently have other priorities.
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So a lot of people have pointed out the obvious factors like experience, time, and money. But I think a another big one is the culture. A lot of FOSS has been impenetrable ime with how many keyboard warriors exist in discord and forum communities. Doesn't exactly make the newbie experience the best
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It can be really hard to get that motivation back. I said the same thing way back. However now I’m a a solid career point, my kids are in college, and I’m divorced. I have to reinvent my life according to only my priorities. This is my opportunity. Yet I’m doom scrolling. Time flies with useless crap and the motivation to create is not as strong
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It’s good in some ways, but I read one of the points as a generational turnover. Graybeards are the people who invented a lot of foss and stayed true to the calling. True heroes. But there needs to be a continuation, fresh blood, a bright future, and the graybeards won’t be around forever.
Graybeards are also people who got into foss when it was easy to start. The fear is there are higher expectations now, vpcreating barriers to entry for the next generation
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That was the stuff you needed to do to do things like: play video games on your computer, get online and chat with people, hell even use your PC to write an essay. You didn't necessarily have to go as far as they described to do that stuff, but you had to do some of it.
Nowadays there's no equivalent. You don't have to at least kinda understand the filesystem to play minecraft on your iPad.
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There may be some truth to that, but seeing Rust take off means there's still interest in lower level languages. Rust is making its way to the Linux kernel and other established FOSS projects, which improves the chances for people uncomfortable with C-style languages to get involved.
But I think the explanation is simpler: younger people don't have the time for FOSS, and few companies pay people to work on FOSS. So these graybeards are either grandfathered into the few roles that exist, or have sufficient time (e.g. kids moved out/largely independent).
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I can't speak to the rest but I started working on Linux and other FOSS in ~1995 as a young man and just never stopped. The same applies to many others I know. We started young and are still here.
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1999, 1991 is Yeltsin,
You are absolutely right, my bad on that one. But actually under Yeltsin there was still room for optimism, and in those years cooperation between the west and Russia increased.
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I think you're missing my point. I'm not saying everyone capable of using a computer today is equivalent to that level of dedication and curiosity. I'm just saying that in the same way only a handful of people do that today only a handful of people pursued it in the past. It's become easier to use computers, but hat doesn't mean there still aren't people who learn the ins and outs of them today like people had to do in the past to use them.
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One aspect of FOSS that most people don't appreciate is how it's funded. Like how it's actually funded.
Once you put a dollar value to the hours put into it, it fairly quickly becomes apparent that most FOSS projects are basically only possible because super rich software engineers (relative to the average person) have the relative luxury to be able to dedicate a ton of free time and effort to building something they think should exist.
It's why there was a huge FOSS boom after the dot com crash when a ton of software engineers suddenly got laid off but were relatively wealthy enough to not have massive pressure to immediately start grinding a 9-5 again.
