from Hacker News

Will young developers take on key open source software?

by nameequalsmain on 1/28/25, 7:05 AM with 20 comments

  • by pjmlp on 1/28/25, 10:08 AM

    Of course not, they have not lived through BSD and GNU adoption, building home computers at home collecting pieces.

    They have not lived through the days that pirated software was common, as most folks would not have income to pay for every single piece of software on their computers.

    They have grown up with disposable computing devices, where OEMs have gone back to pre-PC revolution, where to get an OS upgrade one would get a new computer, and all peripherals were external, USB ports replacing parallel ports, as means to get those margins pre-clone wars back, using software with microtransactions.

    Additionally people have realised that FOOS without income doesn't scale, and we're back to Shareware by another name, with incentives to turn them into VC sponsored unicorns, something that we didn't have back in the day, getting some money to get by was already good enough.

    After my generation is gone, so are all FOSS founders, and like every movent in human history, it will be replaced by something else.

  • by netdevphoenix on 1/28/25, 10:08 AM

    As sad as it might seem, this will be good reality check for companies of all sizes to start contributing to the open source ecosystem they take so much from. Either that or I foresee the rise of some stewarding group balancing the vampires with the contributors (ie. you gotta contribute a relative minimum to feed from the ecosystem). The current state of open source is not sustainable anyway judging by the stories of burn out contributors and most companies are just used to having so much free stuff available that they don't even consider paying back or where the free stuff comes from until vulnerabilities start to increase in abandoned packages with no alternatives beyond fronting an insane amount of dev time to write a replacement or fork the project

  • by kazinator on 1/28/25, 8:33 AM

    > “You've got a next generation who haven't engaged as a philanthropic community and volunteer community in the same way, at the same scale.”

    That's basically a kind way of saying that they mock the crazy old guy who shakes his fists at the cloud, and mumbles something about Microsoft and Google.

  • by alpaccount on 1/28/25, 11:44 AM

    Yes, via FAANG jobs lol. That's one of the few realistic ways young people nowadays can afford to spend a considerable amount of time learning the ins and outs of very complex OSS

  • by oldguyyelling25 on 1/28/25, 1:36 PM

    My impression is that a lot of younger people see working with open source projects in their spare time primarily as a way to do self promotion, in order to get good jobs and grow their networks.

  • by bergie on 1/28/25, 2:17 PM

    Why would they. Majority of open source is just enabling the big players to produce software a little bit faster.

  • by seper8 on 1/28/25, 9:07 AM

    Young people are too busy with being blasted in the ass financially to focus on hobby side projects.

    Boomers pulled up the ladder and now they're wondering why noone is climbing up.