The graying open source community needs fresh blood

If you look at projects in more popular languages like JS, Rust, Python. There is plenty of new blood in the contributors list. I won't speculate as to why, but it looks like the new generation doesn't like c and c++.

I think this is also backed up by the Linux kernel and thunderbird projects. Both are old c/c++ codebases and both have stated they are adopting rust in hopes of drawing interest (and contributors) from the rust community.

Multiple things:

• get rid of mandatory mailinglists
• use a modern git flow without emails
• get the hell off of discord
• don't make me a "maintainer". I write code, I love it. Don't Peter Principle me
• pay me if I'm supposed to care

The goddamn Linux Foundation is investing more into AI than friggin Linux. They could be hiring hundreds of staff to work on Linux with the billions they shove unto AI. What the fuck are they doing? Mozilla is another offender.

Open source foundations with money should be using it to develop open source.

Also, on greybeard conferences: allow virtual participation please? My company isn't going to give me 4 days off to travel somewhere for one day, have a 2 day conference, then take another day to get back. Nor am I going to pay 200+€ or something as an entrance fee on top of my ticket halfway around the world.

Anti Commercial-AI license

Our civilization demands that I be profitable to a parasite who leeches a majority of my labour’s value in order to accumulate obscene levels of wealth.

Without exorbitant amounts of time spent maintaining that profitability, I will end up poor, homeless, and eventually dead from exposure. This leaves vanishingly little time to spend on open source work, regardless of how intellectually and ethically attractive it may be.

Young people today are struggling to make ends meet - they don't have enough comfort and free time to be able to donate their labor.

No time, no money, no house.

I vote we sacrifice a virgin CS student.

I figure business makes quite enough money off my efforts during the day without me also generating value for them for free in the evening.

I feel like there's maybe also a bit of disappointment in open-source going around? The last few years have shown that it's not the silver bullet, it was thought to be.

Companies will find ways to relicense contributions via CLAs, or to just straight up violate your copyright with GenAI. And even projects that technically tick all the open-source boxes, like Chromium and parts of Android, can and do exert plenty control over users, because no one has the manpower to fork them.

Then there's plenty unethical companies making use of open-source, and they rarely contribute back to make up for it.
Nevermind that the open-source infrastructure is owned by corporations (GitHub, Discord etc.).

And it feels ever more present to me that publishing things as open-source means maintenance work, which can quickly lead to burnout. People just expect you to provide updates, no matter what your license text says.

Like, I certainly don't either think that not doing open-source is any closer to a solution. But I'm finally at a point where I feel like my code is useful and good enough to publish, and it just feels like either my only 'users' are corporations scraping my code, or if I promote it, then it's just a ton of maintenance work waiting for me.
I don't know, maybe that's also just a me-problem...

You can kinda see this in things like modding communities or anything piracy related too. Users just want easy solutions even if it's at the expense of creators, and creators are doing it more and more for money rather than any personal drive or satisfaction. I can't believe we've reached a point where even mods are being locked behind paywalls, need to be commissioned or sometimes have entire teams funded by patreon to work on them, it's just another business nowadays.

What can members of the community who can't code help with?

In 2002 we were firing all our mentors.

The greybeards now burned out from maintaining our foundational stuff have no one who's learned the 'why's of best practice under a good mentor, nor have time to donate to open source - and 'fuck you pay me' is cute for all the strings it has, btw, but your mentor would have taught you that.

Some of us, worried at distros drinking IBMs (then redhat) kool-aid of badly built shit who raised concerns were labeled 'just old'; so, like a COVID nurse we said 'no u' and focused on other tools and projects.

Things are gonna die. Somewhere in there things will become poorly-maintained. After a dark time of shit massively sucking - and probably another init daemon because blobs are sexy? - it will get better.

But by then apophis will drag our moon into a declining orbit and make us focus on nuking the moon to push it back up.

The sad thing is that the last few years was the PERFECT time for open source to see a youth resurgence.

Almost two years ago we saw widespread layoffs across the tech industry, and tens of thousands of young people found themselves without work for long periods of time. Many of them would have killed for an opportunity to spend that time "working" for major open source projects with a small stipend for services provided. Young people can say "I was laid off at Viacom, but worked for the Linux Foundation for 6 months before finding my next role at ..."

Hell, you want some hungry talent that would love to work on open source? Target those that are laid off or PIP'd while on visas, and put some legal resources behind supporting their stay in the country while they work on open source, until they find their feet again. Most of them will either go back home or will end up working at predatory consultancy firms that hire L1 or H1 workers that need to stay for their families sake, so take that conveyor belt of talent and put them to work on something useful.

I'd be glad to help but I have no spare time, and practically just a degree in game programming. I dont really know how to get into open source.

What's needed is renewed ethos, not just fresh blood.

What's needed is people who actually like the projects, on the technical level, and use them daily. Not people who are just trying to maintain an open-source "portfolio" they can showcase in pursuit of landing big corpo job.

A "portfolio" which also needs to, in their mind, project certain culture war prioritizations and positionings that are fully inline with the ones corpos are projecting.

It will be interesting to see how much of the facade of morality will remain if these corpo projections change, or when the corpo priorities and positionings, by design, don't care, at best, about little unimportant stuff like American-uniparty-assisted genocide! We got to see murmurs of that in the last few months.

Will the facade be exposed, or will it simply change face? What if a job was on the line?

I'm reminded of a certain person with the initials S.K,, who was a Rust official, and a pretend Windows-user in hopes of landing a Microsoft job (he pretty much said as much). He was also a big culture-war-style moral posturer. And a post-open-source world hypothesiser.

Was it weird for such a supposed moral "progressive" to be a big nu-Microsoft admirer? and one who used his position to push for the idea that anyone who maintained a classical open-source/free-software position towards Microsoft is a fanatic? No, it wasn't. He was one of many after all.

All these things go hand in hand. And if you think this is a derailing comment that went way off the rails, then I hope you maintain the same position about the effects of all this on the open-source and free-software world itself.

I might have missed if it was in the article. Sorry in advance for that.

Do we have any idea regarding the top 3 or top 5 reasons that drove potential contributors away? Not in terms of hypotheses, asking about actual studies, interviews, surveys, etc

This is the best summary I could come up with:

True, the Linux Foundation events all now come with child support for young parents, but my expert guestimate is the average age is still well into the 30s.

More specifically, the Cloud Native Computing Foundations (CNCF)'s KubeCons have many tracks for people who want to learn the ins and outs of Kubernetes and other cloud-native programs.

The OSPO for Good conference proposed solutions that have been suggested before, such as hackathons, to engage young developers in open source coding.

As David Nalley, president of the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) and director of open source strategy at Amazon Web Services (AWS), said at the conference: "Getting people to maintain old code isn't easy.

… I thought if I could hold on just a bit longer, I could help maintain the focus on long term development to improve the user experience.

She also runs the LFX Mentorship program, which seeks to sponsor and train the next generation of open source developers and leaders.

The original article contains 741 words, the summary contains 161 words. Saved 78%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

Blood for the blood god?