Graying open source community needs fresh blood

Open source with Closed Contribution vs Open Source with Open Contribution.

Feel free to fork. Feel free to read the code. Feel free to use as you like. But don't bug me. Don't demand I add features. Don't complain that something doesn't work (especially if it actually works). Don't feel like I owe you anything, because I don't.

vs.

Feel free to fork. Feel free to read the code. Feel free to use as you like. Let me know how its going. Let me know which features you'd like tosee. Tell me when something doesn't work (even if it actually works). I want to be helpful as possible.

Both are fine. Both are defensible. But projects should state prominently what they prefer.

I have an OSS package on python. Its open source because they can read the code; it's just python, with only third-party package being pillow. But I host the code on a private git instance. I hope people find it useful. If they fork it and make it into something extraordinary, fantastic. But I'm uninterested in exposing myself to time-consuming demands of others.

When I was a junior engineer, I felt like I wasn't good enough to contribute to anything open-source, and the open source communities around the projects I liked felt quite condescending.

Once I was a senior engineer, every single employment contract specifically had clauses preventing me from contributing to open source projects (except with specific, explicit permission from your manager).

First, I don't know if the average age of open-source coders is increasing (in a way you wouldn't expect from general demographic trends). Second, if it is happening, blaming mature coders is probably pretty far down the list. More likely is (in no particular order):

(1) corporate contracts that discourage employees from contributing to OSS

(2) green-field effect (there is already a lot of OSS and few obvious opportunities for new OSS, and creating a new open-source project is often easier than it is to gain the trust of developers of an existing project and a lot more exciting,

(3) VC culture: imagine if Facebook had open-sourced their platform from the start; yeah, I can't either, where's the money in that?

I'm a graybeard, so my opinion may or may not have any resonance with the younger crowd. But I'll say this much:

I largely dropped out of and stopped participating with the OSS community years ago. I haven't stopped producing open source (in the generic sense) software and my belief that it's critically important remains undiminished.

But the community as a whole became rather unpleasant for me and so I disengaged. It internalized too much of the mindset and attitudes that plague SV.

I think a major problem is the abundance of entertainment in modern times. Rather than hacking out of curiosity and for fun, there are so many substitutes like games and social media that a high number of young developers simply don’t feel bored enough to do anything.

There are obviously still some pretty prominent young open source devs but they’re quite rare.

I find today’s identity politics in FOSS also slightly problematic but that’s too controversial of a topic to delve into.

I got involved in open source when I was in my teens, and I'm now pushing 40.

I'm as interested as I ever was in consumer free software, but...

Having worked professionally in the software industry for the majority of my career (most of that time in open source), I just could not care less about what comprises the open source "movement" today. I don't want to rehash the whole free software versus open source discussion here, but suffice it to say, most of the energy being put into open source projects today is completely uninteresting to me. Enabling a developer ecosystem with open source, only to see this technology used to create proprietary and downright Orwellian software that abuses the rights of end users more than any point in history doesn't motivate me to participate in corporate open source.

Wake me up when we start writing software where the beneficiary is the end user.

Do you want to attract young people to open source again? Start actually building software where the story behind why open source matters is actually true again.

I find open source software to be very intimidating. It feels like the contributors to these projects are experts in whatever language theyve written them in, and any contribution I might submit will get smacked down in PR for some arcane technical reason, likely with a rude comment

How is the next generation of non-OSS developers being mentored? Can that work for OSS developers?

Culture, craft and meme reproduction is work that must be staffed, same as parenting for species replenishment.

I'm guessing a project like Linux would be fine, given more companies willingness to invest in kernel development. And kernel / native development being itself a potentially lucrative niche.

I worry more about the tertiary command line tools we all take for granted that have 1 burned out maintainer on the verge of retirement.

A material portion of the blame should be placed squarely at the feet of those attitudes similar to the one expressed in this Mastodon thread which I recently saw resurface and hate just as much as the first time I saw it: https://hachyderm.io/@stargirl/109697057391904145

This “I was allowed to try something, but it’s dumb for anyone else to do so” attitude is one of a collection that quite rightfully turns off, hell, not just newcomers, but anyone apart from the old guard.

Truth be told, enough time has passed for many open source communities to have shaken out such that the last ones standing are just the only people toxic enough to outlast everyone else.

Many jaded socially inept OSS greybeards would do the community a service by not subjecting it to their general…grumpiness. Thank you for your service, but drop the messiah complex. Things have a way of working themselves out.

It's great to consume OSS but there are little to none advantages in contributing.

This privilege is left to FANG developers who need to release some OSS project to build a career and highlight the name of their employer.

OSS was a miracle, it worked out of the sheer will of some amazing and ideologically motivated developers, in defiance of market laws. It's doomed to become smaller and smaller until AGI will revolutionise the field.

Besides "write code" and "donate money" what are some other ways to help F/OSS?

i hope this isn't to be taken literally

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6764071/

> Looking to Young Blood to Treat the Diseases of Aging

https://www.wired.com/story/startups-flock-to-turn-young-blo...

> Startups Flock to Turn Young Blood Into an Elixir of Youth