The graying open source community needs fresh blood

A "Youth and Open Source" panel was held at the United Nations (UN) Open Source Program Office (OSPO) for Good conference in the UN building in Manhattan. There was only one little problem with it. To quote Ruth Ikegah, a young Nigerian open source project manager, "We need more young people here because I see a lot of old …

[Bebu]

New Cow Theory?

I have to wonder whether after thirty plus years this field doesn't hold the same attraction that it did for my generation in the 1970-90s.

At Uni In 1975 writing code for assignments I was submitting punched cards to a batch system and collecting line printer output the next day.

A few years later it was a time sharing system with teletype terminals and later visual display units.

All pretty laborious but still fascinating as everything was still new - Lisp, Simula-67 etc etc.

With the advent of affordable hardware and af "personal" computing coupled with the explosion of software for these systems including development tools a whole generation for the first time had the opportunity convert their creativity and imagination into software applications.

I suspect now the gloss has worn off and possibly less than 10% of the comparable contemporary cohort have any interest in these aspects of IT. I have a young relation who is just completing a computer science degree and to my surprise he hasn't done any programming apart from a minimal first year introduction. (0r any more theoretical aspects of computer science.) Unfortunately more manglement studies I suspect.

Fairly obvious what the old cow here would be but is the new cow generative AI? In my decline I don't know what enthuses twenty to thirty year olds other than they seem to face a much greater struggle to make their way in this world which could understandably dampen their enthusiasm for anything else.

I might guess that we had reached peak open source several years before COVID with that pandemic obscuring the fact.

This poses the question of how large will the open source community be in the future and the composition of that community? I imagine somewhat smaller and the majority employed by "for profit" concerns followed at a distance by a variety of "not for profit" entities with a very much smaller population of amateur ^* contributors. My feeling is this will ultimately be to the detriment to open source and to computing, in the widest sense, generally.

At least the problem and inherent dangers have been identified. The cloister bells are tolling.

_{^* in the literal sense (L.< amare)}

[HuBo]

Re: New Cow Theory?

It feels to me like we're asking the kids to surgically take over on maintenance and repair of arcane plumbing issues by freediving deep down into our old cow's cellulose-digesting inner bowels and multiple stomachs, under apnea. But they're trained to write smartphone apps in python cotton candy ... and soon, LLM-&-M nocode, that melts the phone straight in your hands (and mouth). This marshmallow coding generation will need its candy ass whipped back into shape before we can digest our way through this self-inflicted epidemic of intellectual obesity and fully reap the long-term benefits of the healthier FOSS eosystem and lifestyle IMHO ... doing software development right requires the strongest of S&M discipline!

[Anna Nymous]

Re: New Cow Theory?

Wait... are you saying I can't write an operating system using only Javascript which will run in your browser? I even already picked a name for it "Browser System", I want everyone to be able to run my BS which is why I am targeting the browser(*).

(*) Chrome only though!

[martinusher]

Re: New Cow Theory?

You got slightly ahead of me. Everything's built for, and on, the Web which leads to a particular programming mindset that's not helpful for understanding systems. In addition, instead of trying to expand beyond this very ad-hoc environment a lot of effort goes in to forcing it on platforms where it just doesn't belong (IoT is a good example). Its not a very enticing world, especially as younger people have to be obsessed with making money just to live -- "mother's basement" long became an "auxiliary dwelling unit" is is rented out for serious money.

(I should also mention that I, like my mother, became gray haired in my 30s. Hair color has nothing to do with it -- sure a lot of older people are gray but often to have to look hard to find any hair at all!)

[Zoopy]

Re: New Cow Theory?

> Wait... are you saying I can't write an operating system using only Javascript which will run in your browser?

I dunno. The "emacs" OS has a lot of LISP in it.

[Wyrdness]

Re: New Cow Theory?

If you really want your Browser System to be a proper OS, then you should definitely start by cloning systemd in Javascript.

[bazza]

Re: New Cow Theory?

Urrrgghhh, I feel physically nauseous reading that. I had no idea that a software concept could cause that.

[CatBoy]

Re: New Cow Theory?

I've gone past the point of being grey - I'd do a great Santa Claus impersonation.

My youngest son however has only just turned 20 and is doing a Comp Science degree - his problem with the world of open source is a distinct lack of support when he runs into an issue due to "I've never done this before, I can't ask a friend as they've not done it before and I can't google my way out of it".

When asking on various open source forums, some people can be unbelievably snotty with their answers - RTFM or "that's not a real question - come back when you can you write a question". I appreciate a lot of us (me included) are on the spectrum and that everything must match your exacting standards - but try to remember these are young and potentially insecure young people who without help and support will certainly not become as good as you.. and potentially give up -so loosing a generation that could make open source even better.

Try to remember when we all started and made the most appalling cockups in our IT endeavours - but if you were lucky - such as me with the senior programmer Wendy (lovely lady ) who was kind and patiently explained how to do things or improve my own code and helped to make sure I didn't make the same awful mistake again.. For me that was over 40 years ago and I only need to remember back to my junior of junior trainee programmer (who should of not been allowed to use the kettle without supervision - let alone be able to play unrestricted with an IBM 4341 mainframe)

We need to be mentors not tyrants if we want the youth of today to get into helping for free...

[Snake]

Re: New Cow Theory?

Your son's experience in open source is probably common yet, after reading all these replies from [us] old fogies, I fail to see even one person address the (other) elephant in the room.

Costs.

To support FOSS you need to donate time. And time is MONEY. Thanks to the broken system that we old bastards endorse, vote for and support, many young people struggle to just make ends meet. IT pros might make $100k a year but when you need to pay that landlord $4,000 / £3000 monthly for a flat anywhere *near* your job, that money disappears very, very quickly, especially after consideration of paying back that $$$/£££ student loan

So now you're asking these young people to donate their time, skills and attentions to building or maintaining a FOSS infrastructure. From what spare time? From what earning time? From what left over mental and physical energies?

When people feel they are working hard just to survive, asking these same people to also focus on a project that doesn't seem to help in that survival is a BIG ask.

[mistersaxon]

Re: New Cow Theory?

Not all young people have these experiences but I suspect they are the majority by a very large margin. But there is another way - all it needs is time and money (of course). Yes, I speak of "apprenticeships" - emphasis on the "app" these days - and I know that whereof I speak. One of my kids recently finished an apprenticeship at a national institution, being paid to get their degree, rather than ending 4 years of toil with a debt and no meaningful experience. They confidently write code for micro controllers, with c++, python, and low-level IO stuff, which is being used at the cutting edge of science research to hopefully help advance processes to recycle metals much more efficiently. Meanwhile, as a side hustle, they have been roped in to deliver an online course to local schools introducing the kids to Python (code, not Monty). They not only deliver the course (four times so far - once a year since they started their apprenticeship), but they also rewrote it into an online format so it could be delivered at all (using Jupyter notebooks, which this old fart has found to be really quite a lot of fun). Young people want to work, and want to do interesting things - don't we all?

But, of course, although these keen-eyed apprentices *are* working, they need to be taught and supervised so the RoI is not instant, and frankly that is why you have to rely on a quasi-governmental body to run such a program - businesses are far too busy cutting the bottom line while failing to notice that all their senior technical staff are getting older, slower, grumpier and proportionally less well-paid over time (cf. management). Heck, for the platforms I work on you can't even PAY the vendor for critical education in some areas. And that lack of interest by businesses in real investment in people is why this grey wave of doddering old wrecks is happening. Makes me very sad, to be honest.

[ianbetteridge]

Re: New Cow Theory?

I worked for a German company in the UK for several years, and it was notable that their attitude towards apprenticeships was VERY different to every British business I have worked in. Not only did they encourage them at entry level: they encouraged them for existing employees, too (British apprenticeships go all the way up to level 7, which is Master’s degree equivalent - I did one in leadership when I was pretty senior, and it was hugely rewarding).

For once, I think this is only *partly* the government's fault. Every larger business pays the apprenticeship levy, and can draw that money back from HMRC if it sends its employees on certified apprenticeship schemes. Remarkably few actually bother, perhaps because they would rather not commit to allowing 20% of time for a period of training (even though that training can be on the job, and in fact, to satisfy the requirements of the apprenticeship actually has to be beneficial to the business).

British businesses just seem to want to devolve all training to universities, subsidised heavily by government.

[Dagg]

Re: New Cow Theory?

We need to be mentors not tyrants if we want the youth of today to get into helping for free...

The problem I found is the same problem that has existed for generations. The youngsters already know everything, as far as they are concerned us old farts have no idea.

And... you must admit that when we were young we were the same...

[Zolko]

Re: New Cow Theory?

I don't think that the problem lies there: when I was young I learned programming on a Commodore C64, everything was new for everybody. We were discovering a whole new world full of possibilities and nobody had a better answer to any problem. Today, you want the young people to be enthusiastic in doing things that have been done and that some people know better ? There is no fun in it. If you want young people to participate it's useless to be "inclusive" or any such idiocy : give them new tools and let them use them as they want.

They are shown Hollywood films where the heroes are hackers (Matrix) or revolutionary (Hunger Games) , yet when the kids actually do any of it in real life they get jailed. They are told to use less screen-time and then they are forbidden to go out with their friends to save grandma who doesn't even care about that covidiocy that middle-aged cretins pretend will decimate Humanity.

How on Earth can kids healthily grow up in such an environment ?

[Dagg]

Re: New Cow Theory?

I learned programming on a Commodore C64, everything was new for everybody. We were discovering a whole new world full of possibilities and nobody had a better answer to any problem

Doh! at that point I had been working as a programmer for 10 years. As a hobby I wrote various micro games and use to submit programs to the various mags. BASIC was old school to me, we had used it via dial up to a mini computer in the uni when I was at high school.

It was NOT new for everybody, just new for you!

[katrinab]

Re: New Cow Theory?

Which of course is what led to the likes of Linux in the first place, a young student who thought he knew better than his professor.

[withQuietEyes]

Re: New Cow Theory?

This is it, yeah. I tried to get into understanding open source (nothing fancy; trying to understand how Arch worked, attempting to read source code for open-source programs I was using) and hit that wall of sarcasm pretty much immediately. I don't think I even got to the point of asking my own questions! I found questions other people had asked and got scared off by the replies they were getting. I can't speak for others, but personally I'm definitely more sensitive than the average programmer, and being scolded for asking a question scared me off trying all that hard at the time.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: New Cow Theory?

This is the problem. I'm no spring chicken at this point (40) but I've always been turned off by this attitude.

I do see why you have this opinion though, I've trained a few younger developers than myself that have found themselves stuck in the quagmire of fluffy languages and frameworks. Most of them come out of university and you have to spend a lot of time winding back what they've been taught before you can build them up again. It is possible though. These kids aren't dumb they've been taught by fucking idiots (usually academic greybeards).

The difference between the older coders out there and the younger ones is that the older ones are largely self taught (including myself) because there wasn't a lot of formal training when we were young and the industry (as we know it) was quite young and nobody really knew where it was going.

I personally started out in the mid 90s (I know, I was 10) learning how to code, solder etc etc and it was extremely difficult because the internet was brand new and resources were light (if you could get on at all, being 10, that was tricky for me)...so I used pocket money to buy the occasional book...most of them were crap. I eventually had two reasonably good books, a simple book on HTML and Javascript (it was one of those brightly coloured "in easy steps" books) which was enough to help me understand the source code on other peoples websites by viewing source (which was the common way to learn back then) and a really good book on C/C++ which I wish I still had but I can't remember the author or publisher (it had a boring white cover with a couple of navy blue and red stripes), it had a really good section on reverse engineering (which is a lost art).

The key point is that a lot of learned by reverse engineering other peoples work...that is not a skill that is taught because somehow reverse engineering stuff has become frowned upon. I still reverse engineer things today to help towards figuring something out and it is one of my higher paying skills.

I did something the other day, which to me is trivial, but it blew the mind of a younger engineer...I managed to mount the encrypted file system in a "protected" virtual machine...all I did was dump the bootloader with binwalk to get the filesystem key and this young guy thought I'd pulled off the heist of the century...I needed to do it to fix a problem for this guy, the networking on the VM wasn't working (it's a preconfigured product and I suspected the documentation was wrong, which it was), the docs were crap and I wanted to see how the network was configured inside the VM (it's just Linux, so not a big deal to figure out once inside)...he said "you know that's a £75,000 a year product you pissed on and made an absolute joke out of?"...I had no idea, to me it looked like a typical shitty VM with less security than the average capture the flag VM.

Anyway, in my earlier years I decided against going to university because the courses were crap...it was all still FORTRAN, mainframes and other massively dated stuff...it was quicker, easier and more interesting to get industry certified...I think that is still the case. My nephew got his degree in comp sci about a year ago and I helped him through the course, the curriculum right now is about on par with what was an MCSE was back in the day. Possibly worse...as part of his coursework, he had to write a proposal for a fictional small business based on a specification...but on the entire course he'd never built a domain controller...so over one very long night I had to compress an entire MCP course and download it into his head...once I'd done that, he found the assignment to be a piece of piss and he was shocked that they hadn't taught him the same thing.

There was no element of reverse engineering on the course and for the "cybersecurity" element of the course, there was no hands on demonstration of even simple/common tools like nmap or wireshark. The lad wasn't even taught how to make an ethernet cable.

The university was The University of Manchester Institute of Technology. A university I once dreamed of attending because it was one of the best in the world apparently. It seems to be utter garbage these days.

On the other side of the pond there is MIT...I was invited to be a part of a short course for tech startups there as I was part of a team out of another university (I was invited on to the team by a friend who lectures at the University)...and my word, the attitude at MIT is noxious. We were on the course with a bunch of other "startups", most of which were not tech related at all and were fucking piss poor ideas (I can't explain the ideas here because it would give away the people that were on the course and I don't think they deserve any hate)...anyways, it seems basically impossible at MIT to have a bad idea because nobody will tell you that you suck. Everyone is amazing. Everything is amazing...and everyone tells you to "dream the dream" etc etc...it's all high fives, back patting etc etc...absolutely zero ground level "actually mate, your idea sucks, maybe you should think about this, or that etc".

Anyone coming out of that system is going to hit the real world and be eaten up. It's as simple as that. They come out not understanding failure and thinking they're ready to lead the world...but in reality they're possibly absolute garbage and fall well short of the standard and the first time they hit actual criticism, it'll shatter them.

It's sad.

None of this is a showstopper though, it can be fixed, but it requires us older folks to take younger folks under our wings and show them the way without coddling them. They need an environment where they can have the wind knocked out of them a few times, where they can fail a few times without it having career damaging effects and be taught that failing is just a part of engineering...it's not about first time success, it's about failing fast enough that you can dust off, regroup and get back in again to try something else out then eventually succeed.

[CountCadaver]

Re: New Cow Theory?

FORTRAN and mainframes? When you went to university 22 years ago?

I call BS, why? Because I went to college and university from 99-04 and it was ALL desktop computers by then and we (and about every other university I visited in a 200 mile radius) were teaching C/C++/Java, with some offering units on stuff like Progress.

So you are either well over 60 or you are just making it up as you go along.

Your tale also smells fishier than a fishmongers bin during a heatwave....

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: New Cow Theory?

I don't call BS. I was force-fed F77 at university in 1999 as part of a Physics degree; supposedly because it was still widely used in science. I learned C++ off my own back in parallel, because USEFUL!

I detested that particular module of the course. I went to great pains to ensure I had working code throughout the course; and repeatedly got low marks. On the final assignment, I more or less copy-pasted the lecturers notes, which had all manner of things just plain wrong, and submitted. Got the highest score on that one of all the module. That particular module had a special flavour of shit to it, and it has to be said, I was more than ready to quit uni over it. I stuck it out as I'd already ran up 2 2/3rd years worth of fees by that point.

There is some irony that the formerly state owned institution where I work still has a bunch of tools from the late 1970's that were originally coded in fortran for an IBM S360 mainframe. They were still being used through comedic levels of emulation, what with a UMIST-developed mainframe emulator for DOS being the host. Which these days, you probably need a DOS VM to put that on.

I could re-spec and re-do them elsewhere, and indeed, experimented in doing so with some of the more modern and fluffy languages mostly as an excuse to learn some Java and Python. But the original tools are still sticking around for now. Source code is, interestingly, also available in the British Library.

It did not take me long to run back to C++ for some semblance of control and tolerable syntax. Pythons whitespace/tabbing seems to have been designed to be especially infuriating.

A/C, because universities probably take a dim view of plagiarism even if it was 25 years ago, no matter how justified.

[ianbetteridge]

Re: New Cow Theory?

"FORTRAN and mainframes? When you went to university 22 years ago?"

I absolutely believe it. I did A level computer science in 1984 and the curriculum still involved learning about ferrite core memory, which had been obsolete for a decade.

[JT_3K]

Re: New Cow Theory?

It's funny. I started around the same time as you and faced similar issues. Taught myself GWBasic from a book provided with the PC. I was on track to do some level of coding-based-role when I started Computing as one of my courses in college. That's when it all unraveled.

I went from finding creativity and freedom in the software I wrote, with a passion for logic and problem solving and a desire to make people's lives better with the software I could create, to hating it. The problem was that the subject teacher had evidently learned at the end of the 1960s and was not long to retirement. I didn't learn much coding, but the need to understand processor operations in minutiae was apparently critical. No active training on effective neat and resource light coding. No modern programming languages. No discussion on modern techniques such as APIs or importance of database architecture. Just endless learning-by-rote of processor queues and how processors worked on a basic level.

I'm sure, were I looking to code a kernel, the course would have been useful. As I wanted to be a general programmer, I had no ability to contextualise or apply any of it and although I tried to hammer it in to pass an exam, it never stuck. I would hazard a guess that of those that had that syllabus, a small fraction will have made use of that knowledge.

Subjected to that, I pivoted to general IT with a networking basis. I've written PHP, ASP, HTML and edited desktop code since then, but a solid grounding in actually generally useable coding would have been so much more helpful.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: New Cow Theory?

This, I went into to tech to further my interest in learning how things worked and to be able to make things to improve peoples lives and solve problems, I wanted to build on top of the wave I was riding at the time...absolutely no academic course offered me this...the kind of stuff they teach you in university in the tech space can be learned in a weekend reading Wikipedia and watching Computerphile on Youtube...it's fucking crap. Extremely broad and extremely shallow...I wanted depth not breadth.

[withQuietEyes]

Re: New Cow Theory?

I mean yeah, that sounds like exactly the reason why nobody i know (even those of us who like and use open-source) want to join old or important open-source projects. The attitude of everyone in them is "You young kids don't know how to write Real Code! You need to be whipped into shape!" ... and then fail to provide any whipping. Or explanations. People with the will and ability to sit down and independently read through thousands of lines of code are few and far between, and they're mostly busy doing things that make a lot more money than open-source. The rest of us do actually need our hands held if you want us to become useful.

[J.G.Harston]

Re: New Cow Theory?

Sigh.

Computer Science != Programming. IT != Computer Science.

My nephew is an airline pilot. Wah Wah, he still hasn't done any aeronautical engineering design yet.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: New Cow Theory?

Yes we know, thanks for pointing out the problem, you didn't need to be a twat though...kids go to get comp sci degrees because job listings ask for it. Then the kids turn out to have no appropriate skills for the job because comp sci is the wrong thing to ask for...the problem is the universities aren't providing the requisite skills and the hirers don't know what they're asking for there is a massive disconnect between Universities (who don't understand the real world) and the real world (who don't understand Universities). It's a shitty dumbass cycle that all of us can see clear as day but the people managing the system (recruiters) and providing the workers (Uni) can't see it at all...because they are fuckwits.

University is shit and the job market is fucked...it's absolutely no fault of the youngsters entering the industry at all.

What we need in the industry is a vendor independent authority for certifying and training engineers in a way that provides them with actual vocational skills...we don't need academics at all...what we need is people with a basic set of hands on skills and a basic knowledge that can be built on by senior people in the industry.

[Roland6]

Re: New Cow Theory?

> What we need in the industry is a vendor independent authority for certifying and training engineers in a way that provides them with actual vocational skills

We do, the BCS, ACM et al, all accredit degree programmes…

If you don’t like what they are accrediting, then get involved.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: New Cow Theory?

You can't fix degrees. One of the key problems is time. It takes far too long to complete a degree and takes up far too much of an individuals time making it very difficult to get other certifications at the same time.

Based on the current day content I've seen, you get the same amount of useful technical exposure spread out thinly over 3 years that you would get in a classic intensive 6 week Microsoft bootcamp.

The only way to fix degrees is to allow self study and have flexibility on the pace at which the degree can be attained.

Yes, it will lead to more people having degrees and thus reduce the perceived value of them, but I think it would push them towards their actual value rather than the inflated value.

I think most people that have been working in the tech industry for at least 2 years would likely be capable of passing a Comp Sci degree in 6 months or less with not a lot of effort...and time would be quite the differentiator.

Do you hire the guy that worked his ass off and got a bog standard first class degree in 6 months or do you go for the Hons guy that took 3 years?

Right now, the only differentiator you have is whether the candidate was wealthy enough to cruise through 3 years and get out without any debt, or whether someone was poor and dumb enough to saddle themselves with a massive debt.

Degrees are not a level playing based on achievement, quality and hard work...they are based on time and money.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: New Cow Theory?

There's some truth to this. E.g. I'm quite confident that I got more useful career experience in my student worker jobs at university (various helpdesk, computer lab tape changing, junior Unix admin, etc.) than I did from most of the classes.

Computer Science back then (circa 1985-90) was part of the "hard" sciences, so we took all the same physics, chemistry, and calculus as the folks getting aerospace, E.E., and mechanical engineering degrees. Plus it was basically tailored to churn out more software engineers, or at least programmers. There was essentially no "IT" sort of classes, let alone a bone fide degree track.

I understand that has changed somewhat in the intervening years, e.g. my uni is/was offering a "computer engineering"(?) degree of some kind, in addition to C.S., which supposedly had some focus on things outside of software languages and programming. Whether than including sysadmin-type stuff too, I dunno. I'd like to think so, but I tend to doubt it.

Conversely, it hear that the "teaching languages" have largely shifted from Pascal, FORTRAN, and C from when I was at university, to more modern stuff like Java(script, I guess?), visual basic(?), apparently. I haven't checked.

That's probably fine as far as it goes, for showing how to use if/then/for/while/case/etc. and fundamental things like variable assignment and so on. But if you actually do want to be a programmer or even a software engineer, that seems a little short to me. Maybe I'm not giving enough credit -- I'm certainly no java or vb programmer. Or programmer at all, really -- I went in other directions. :-)

I'm glad I got my C.S. degree -- as folks point out, it did help open doors for me during early career. But purely from an applicable skills standpoint, a vocational or similar tech school might have been just as good and possibly less student loan debt.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: New Cow Theory?

Yes, I also did various other subjects as well at A-Level...I did Physics, Chemistry, Pure Maths (x2 because I also did a further A Level, can't remember what they were called, but it resulted in a degree equivalent qualification), Mechanical Maths (x2 again, degree equivalent) and (ugh) Statistical Maths (x1 because I really couldn't be bothered with the second one, it was so dull).

I also did Business Studies, Law (Criminal and Business), ICT (which was a vocational qualification of some description, not an A Level, might have been a BTEC, basically passed it by default because I barely turned up for lectures, just sat the exams, did the coursework etc).

What people tend to miss with qualifications is that the qualifications themselves are graded from 1 to 7...1 being equivalent to say a GCSE and 7 being equivalent to a Masters degree. 6 is the equivalent to a Bachelors degree. The grade level is what you should be working towards not the actual qualification itself.

For example, a CISSP certification (which you can do in your own time and at your own pace to a certain extent, there are arbitrary additional requirements) is recognised as a Grade 7 qualification...i.e. it's basically equivalent to a Masters degree. MCSE used to be Grade 6.

Some of us might remember a time when job listings read (MCSE or Degree Equivalent).

I don't have an actual degree...but I do have three (potentially more, some I haven't checked) Grade 6 qualifications across several sciences and two Grade 7 qualifications (both tech related)...so my level of education / qualification / attainment, whatever word you use, exceeds that of a traditional "one degree pony" and possibly most Masters degree holders...and yet, sometimes I stuggle to get past the "degree requirement" which is mental, because these recruitment agents are binning what are quite possibly better candidates based on a really broad and arbitrary filter...at the very least they're throwing away loads of diamonds whilst searching for shiny gold in a massive box of plain old rocks.

There are businesses out there that recognise this, and they are usually very rewarding to work for (because they know your value and they're willing to pay it, whereas an over filtered role probably has a budget associated with it so it doesn't matter what you're actually worth) so the lost opportunity isn't that bad overall...because if a business is willing to cut off it's own nose to spite it's face then it's probably not a company you want to work for...but still...they're missing out on truly good candidates by way of a very ill informed broad filter.

One degree is a pretty average thing to have these days, and if you filter for that specific trait then you're going to mostly get average candidates and harder to find the diamonds because you've already discarded them.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: New Cow Theory?

Pilots that don't know how their underlying hardware works are not good pilots; especially when the software does not recognise what is happening.

See the Air France disaster over the south Atlantic, amongst other examples.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: New Cow Theory?

Well for me in the late 90s it was because University courses were still this:

"At Uni In 1975 writing code for assignments I was submitting punched cards to a batch system and collecting line printer output the next day"

So I didn't go to university. I went and did a bunch of industry certs and just got a job, it was better that way. By the time my contemporaries left university, I was their boss.

It is still the case now that universities lag behind the industry and on top of that the contents of the courses and the length of time / money required make them very uncompetitive...you spend years at University learning about the same as you can learn on a 4 week industry bootcamp which is far cheaper.

[TheMeerkat]

Re: New Cow Theory?

University and school is the time when one supposed to engage in Open Source.

If they don’t, they will never do it.

[Roland6]

Re: New Cow Theory?

This is the real point.

Digital, then Microsoft and Apple put a lot into education because they wanted to encourage a generation of developers familiar with their tools. Open Source need to re-engage with its roots; the universities. We need the textbooks to draw upon Open Source(*) and more to help students to both access and appreciate the Open Source repository and to think it is natural to contribute.

(*) I have not used the Systems Approach books and resources to any great extent to know if they are good exemplars or not.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: New Cow Theory?

MS have an active interest in not teaching vocational skills in schools; not least because of their extensive; painful, certification offerings.

[joeldillon]

Re: New Cow Theory?

Should have done a history degree, worked for me, lots of spare time to learn how to write C on my own time ;)

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: New Cow Theory?

When offshoring became the default, I ran for the hills. In the late 90's and early 2000s, consulting on Oracle (spit) databases - the money was good, even if the product was not! Systems analysts and so forth could be a decently paid profession. By 2007 it had become dogshit, replaced by competition from offshore. Games developers (in the UK at least) used to be a decent line of employment but Electronic Arts and Sony stripped the guts out of far too many developers here. See the fate of Codemasters and Psygnosis - and bunch of others.

The puzzle is still enjoyable; but as a line of work not so good. I could not with a straight face recommend a pure IT career in-of-itself to a teenager. If you have the ability then you have much more lucrative career choices available to you, versus the cost-of-living nonsense to go for; and hence why I jumped ship.

With regards open source, people do have to earn a living; and as such a lot of the big open source development resides within organisations with a product to shift. RedHat being the most obvious. Mozilla, and others.

There are places where hobbyists could potentially take ownership of the mantle of maintainer for given unix tools; but opportunities are few and far between. Folks don't like relinquishing control no matter how necessary it might be!

When was the last time you saw one of the "familiar" names of maintainers-of-specific tools ask the question "who wants to take over the role of maintainer?"

Linux poses some interesting challenges for, e.g. if key individuals were to be hit by busses, then what... Poettering's spaghetti code; Torvalds as benign-dictator-for-life, and others.

[Plest]

Personally I've almost had enough, time is running out and I don't want to do this anymore. I'm 53 now I started coding when I was 9 years old and when I was 17 I would sit for 16-17 hours straight just coding and learning as everything was so new and exciting. These days I've made a nice pile from my skills and retirement is on the horizon. I want to spend more time with my family, I want put in more time to enjoy taking photos of birds at RSPB places. I still love tech, I still find I can do the job with enthusiasm but the magic is fading fast 'cos I know I've only got aroudn 30 years left and I want to do something else with my remaining time.

That's just me, I know a few others my age who were mental computer nerds as kids but now they just want to get through the last few years of their career and go do something else. You do something for 30 years, even something you're passionate about, there comes a day where you just don't want to do it anymore.

The sad thing is that the "new frontier" spirit of computing on the early 1980s for me was how it made me feel truly special, I knew I was once of a kind in my class, you could count the computer kids on the fingers of one hand and we banded together traded secrets, tried to outdo each other. These days if you want to know something Google or ChatGPT have all the answers, no need to learn how to make friends so you have someone to grow with and both better your skills.

Society and life have changed in the IT game, these days it's mostly just maintaining existing products. Get a problem, work it out and just email support, wait 2 hours and fix arrives. Coding is just the same out stuff I've been doing for years 'cos companies don't take risks anymore, too much regulation and too much risk control, some of it is a good thing but it stifles creativity.

I can fully understand the serious issues that FOSS is about to face, the old guard are burned out or just plain bored, a lifetime spent on something is a long time and without fresh blood we're going to have a problem on our hands.

[Rich 2]

On a personal level, what you say rings loud and clear. I’m 57 and I’m definitely feeling the “had enough of it”.

In terms of new blood not coming through, I also think there’s definitely a lack of skills in the young ‘uns. All the useful stuff - OSs, big complex useful programs etc - are all written in C or C++, both of which seem to be largely shunned by the new breed, in favour or shiny shiny of the day; javascript (seriously?), Python, whatever. And there’s definitely a deep lack of systems knowledge now; that’s an education issue - how are you supposed to grasp the importance of really basic stuff like data types, data alignment, address spaces, what a linker does etc when you learn using Python? Half the people these days struggle with understanding what a pointer is!! (Isn’t that a really BAD thing that C has?). Oh and assembler - NOBODY uses assembler any more, right?

Given this background, I’m not at all surprised there’s nobody coming up to take over major projects.

[karlkarl]

>

> javascript (seriously?), Python, whatever. And there’s definitely a deep lack of systems knowledge now; that’s an education issue

>

Ultimately, these are the non-technical guys that decades ago wouldn't even be on a computer, so you can discard them from the pool.

The fact is that there are still large amounts of really talented young people coming out who are jumping straight into C and C++ (lets be honest, these are the only ones that matter for a few lifespans!). We are in a good position here. Many engage on mailing lists and IRC and really are trying.

My only concern is that there is a lot of noise these days. It is more difficult for the most talented guys to stand out and take a lead on important directions.

[ianbetteridge]

"Ultimately, these are the non-technical guys that decades ago wouldn't even be on a computer, so you can discard them from the pool."

And that elitist attitude sums up the actual problem.

[b0llchit]

And there’s definitely a deep lack of systems knowledge now; that’s an education issue

They say the young generation are "digital natives", but they have no clue whatsoever what a computer is, what it does and how it works. They are generally consumers and at best (bad) users.

Learning the nitty gritty stuff is hard work and our hardware is so fast that you can get away with (very) sloppy coding. Learning the intricate stuff has never been a stronghold in education. It is mostly done by experimenting and long hours hacking stuff. If there should be one addition to the curriculum, then it should be practice classes doing high-level stuff on bare-bone minimal hardware; i.e. learning to deal with limits and boundaries.

But the problem is not only hardware knowledge. Many have no clue how a build-chain works or what you actually need to make a distributable program or firmware. A lot of new code I see nowadays falls in the category "The internet suggestion looks good, the 15276 dependencies loaded and the IDE says its OK and it compiles, lets run it in production".

And, besides, the effort to make something good and fast is high and your manager does not appreciate it.

_{^{And, BTW, yes, I (still) use assembly. Especially in microcontrollers. Oh,... I'm one of those old guys.}}

[Andy Non]

Amazon advert on TV

Re your comment "They say the young generation are "digital natives", but they have no clue whatsoever what a computer is, what it does and how it works. They are generally consumers and at best (bad) users."

That Amazon advert on TV makes me cringe, Amazon saying what a wonderful employer they are and give an example of a warehouse worker who has moved on to be a software developer and they quip that his teenage son says "his coding skills aren't bad". Geesh, what does the average teenager today know about coding skills? In my youth I was doing hardcore programming in assembly language with a compiler I'd written myself.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Amazon advert on TV

In my youth I was doing hardcore programming in assembly language with a compiler I'd written myself.

And I lived in shoe box in middle of road...

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Amazon advert on TV

and you trying telling that to the young people of today ...

[An_Old_Dog]

Re: Amazon advert on TV

"All we had to eat was a pile of dirt. If we were good, we didn't get desert ..."

[Roland6]

Re: Amazon advert on TV

>” In my youth I was doing hardcore programming in assembly language with a compiler I'd written myself.”

Compilers are only necessary for “high level” languages, not needed for ASM…

In my youth I wrote the code generator for a C compiler…

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Amazon advert on TV

Writing a compiler yourself is pretty standard material on a degree level compsci course as of the last 20 years.

Doing it a couple years earlier off your own back is impressive, albeit there are some great tutorials out there for how to approach such a thing now. Even a barebones OS from scratch has good tutorial content readily available.

[doublelayer]

"Digital native" never meant "knowledgeable assembly language programmer". It only meant "can probably use a computer successfully without needing support". Don't assume that the people saying it are attributing skills they probably don't understand themselves.

[Anonymous Coward]

"can probably use a computer successfully without needing support".

For varying definitions of "use", "computer", success", and "support", yes.

E.g. while your average smart phone these days is worlds more powerful than what many of us greybeards here learnt on in school or university, you'd be hard pressed to call it a "computer" in the sense that most of us likely think of the term. Rather, it's an appliance, a consumer gadget. A very expensive one, but still. It's not meant for learning or "what if" experimenting or general-purpose duties.

And "use" means different things to different people. I (somewhat reluctantly) can "use" Windows if there's no other option, in that I can click here and there, probably open a browser, and find directions to the local shop and so on. Am "using" Windows there? I suppose, but it's a real stretch to say I know what I'm doing. Not much different from the phone example, e.g. I can text the missus and arrange dinner, even (shockingly) make a call with the thing if it comes to that. But to me they're both gadgets with a somewhat opaque UI and I don't really understand the workings.

This is vastly different from my professional life in tech, where I worked as a sysadmin on both the metal and the OS, and had a good handle on both. "Support" back then generally meant man pages and paper manuals, maybe a FAQ from usenet or an FTP site if you were lucky, and "success" typically meant you worked out how to do it and carried on. Today it means google, reddit, etc.

I think someone up-thread said it right: younger folks have been born into a more digital age, they will never know what it was like to be disconnected and offline, they'll never really lack computing resources, and technology will have been part of their lives from day 1.

In some ways they're fortunate. It also means they can sometimes take all this technology for granted.

[doublelayer]

"It's [a phone] not meant for learning or "what if" experimenting or general-purpose duties."

It is absolutely meant for general purpose duties. That's why it can run lots of types of applications and has plenty of hardware that's not needed for the basics. As for learning, I can kind of agree there, as both IOS and Android make it difficult or impossible to write programs for them on them directly, so experimenting with a phone usually means using a desktop or laptop to write the code, then running it on the phone.

However, most computers were not built for learning. The BBC Micro or the Raspberry Pi had that goal in mind, but a lot of computers were built to do computing, and then people who wanted to learn used them to learn. The people who made the computer on which I wrote my first line of code didn't do that to teach kids how to program. They did it to sell a box with a processor in it, mostly so that people could run existing programs. I learned anyway.

[Anonymous Coward]

> It is absolutely meant for general purpose duties.

I tend to doubt it.

That is, it seems more likely that Apple and Samsung et al meant their phones to be bought (or leased), preferably for exorbitant prices, carried around for a while to track the user, encourage them (gently or otherwise) to buy more accessories and apps and software plans etc., and after not too long, be obsolete so as to repeat the cycle and maintain profit.

Most likely they didn't want users (=consumers) to poke around under the hood, take them apart, program it themselves, install their own stuff, and so on.

[Anonymous Coward]

Learning the tool chain to make full use of a phone is quite the commitment, and requires ongoing effort to stay on top of. IDE, cross compiling tools, emulators, and the endless dependency hell that is trying to stay on top of the libraries and development kits needed.

I've looked at it occasionally, and honestly, unless you're going to do it full time it just isn't viable to just experiment. And especially not to pick up in your spare time after school.

This *is* a recipe for breaking the supply chain if there ever was one.

The people who made your first computer, probably made it, to *sell*. In the early 80's, at least, games on tape plus BASIC were generally considered the killer applications. Systems that survived had catalogues. Systems that died didn't, or had obscure languages in ROM. The Jupiter ACE comes to mind.

By the time of Amiga and rise of Windows 3.1, development tools were disappearing behind paywalls (or piracy) that locked out a whole community of potential dabblers. AmigaBASIC (on early workbench) was a bit slow in my experience, and in any event, Commodore ripped it from the later releases of workbench anyway. AMOS was good, but still not insignificant paywall for the average teenager. Maybe the cost of two big box games to get a copy. AMOSPro I still adore to this day. Truly inspired design and performant even on a bog standard 68000 CPU while exposing the potent blitter capabilities in miggy hardware.

On PC, most of us had some exposure to GW or QBasic (what a downgrade after AMOS!), but little else readily accessible. Colleges by the mid 90s had been thoroughly absorbed into the MS Ecosystem with "Programming" if was usually in MS' VB or if you were lucky, Borland's Delphi. If you had a modem, there were some hard-to-learn C/C++ options out there. I remember ferrying loads of floppies in and out of college to use the library computers on the net to download DJGPP... Not the easiest thing to pick up to say the least without continuous access.

Tools have gotten a bit better since then, but something to just pick up and dabble still doesn't really exist. Python, on platform of choice generally being the nearest match to that. Unfortunately, I have developed a thorough hatred for the whitespace formatting rules and dependency hell to do anything more interesting than a text window.

[b0llchit]

Indeed, it never meant that. The blind attribute magician status to the "digital natives" who themselves are unable to see. The image of computers and the computer science field is immensely distorted among the non-techies.

I've also met really many people, who think that anyone (barely able to) using a word processor is bordering to computer genius. Using a spreadsheet catapults them to programmer status. That says a lot about the disconnect between perception and reality...

[J.G.Harston]

"Digital native" means "can type". It's the 21st century equivalent to in the 19th century being able to drag a pencil across a sheet of paper. It's "knows how to breath".

[Anonymous Coward]

The limitations of the English language, and throwaway labelling especially are all to plainly obvious when one goes down the road of questioning "what is a digital native".

Gene Kranz used similar terms to describe the guys in the "trench" - the Apollo command centre - very much the first big group outside of esoteric research environments to be have to become "digitally native". Lots of Fortran and Assembler used there of course, at very low levels by necessity. The sort of skills that your average El Reg reader holds in high regard.

This is obviously quite a different set of skills to being able to navigate ones way around a phone or PC effectively. As ever, the problem with labelling anything is rarely simple. probably creating more problems than it solves. Is a kid using scratch to "develop" their first "game" with moving sprites on the screen any less indulging in "programming" than one of us old gits dabbling in ASM to create an algorithm that runs as fast as possible?

There are whole, and very profitable businesses that exist out of being consumers of stuff. Is MrBeast any less a "digital native" than you or I hacking some obscure 6502 assembly?

One can say the same for "Engineering", which is not a protected term (in the UK). Is the mechanic following a rigid procedure an "Engineer"? Or the person restocking the vending machine? I might work in an Engineering firm, and have Engineer in the job title. Heck, I am even a member of the IET. But do I consider myself an Engineer? Scientist turned glorified accountant most of the time.

[Will Godfrey]

I was a late starter - mid 30's before I started to get into any software development. Before that it was all electronics. I'm now 75, and finding it harder to concentrate for long periods, but still want to carry on being part of the team I work with. I think it depends more on just what you are doing in the field - and why.

[Ganso]

"I think it depends more on just what you are doing in the field - and why."

There, have a pint on me.

[doublelayer]

Your stereotype might not be helping. I'm a relatively young (adult, working in industry for a while) programmer, and yes, I too was taught C and assembly and systems programming in general. I don't use the assembler now because my code runs on servers, and if it switches from X64 to ARM servers we don't want to have to compile it again, but I can, have, do, and will write C programs whenever it is useful. If I switch to somewhere where writing in assembler has a point, I know the concepts involved, and while I won't start as quickly as those who already do it, I can do that as well.

I also know enough not to assume that C is always the right hammer for any nail that comes along. Obviously for things like the Linux kernel, you will need a language that compiles to efficient machine code, and there are other areas where that is of paramount importance. Even there, C is not the only such language. However, a lot of software, if written in C, will run in less CPU time and take a lot more development time, and in many cases, CPU time is so cheap that the improvement is irrelevant. People who make assumptions that those who choose to use something other than C do so because they are not smart or knowledgeable enough to use that tool can often be wrong.

[Dagg]

However, a lot of software, if written in C, will run in less CPU time

Not always as these days compiler optimisation can sort that out.

And as far as the language used, a bad programmer is still a bad programmer not matter what the language. The only real advantage with some of the newer languages is they provide slightly better protection against the bad programmer. You will still need a damn good QA team before it is safe to put into production.

[joeldillon]

How much compiler optimisation do you think the standard Python interpreter is doing (not one of the weird implementations nobody actually uses)? That's just not Python's focus, for example. Something like Rust or Swift will be competitive but most people writing in not-C are writing in something that isn't trying to be a compiled native code language with C-like performance.

[Roland6]

>” How much compiler optimisation do you think the standard Python interpreter is doing”

Zero, it’s an interpreter…

[Jason Bloomberg]

An interpreter which interprets source code compiled to bytecode.

[captain veg]

Re: javascript (seriously?), Python, whatever.

There's nothing inherently wrong with either JavaScript or Python. Both are high-level programming languages for creating applications. Neither is intended for low-level system stuff.

What worries me is that many Python apps are really just wrapping and glue for third-party libraries that do the real work, and which are themselves usually built in C or similar. Someone has to maintain them and create new ones to address tomorrow's business problems.

-A.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: javascript (seriously?), Python, whatever.

>What worries me is that many Python apps are really just wrapping and glue for third-party libraries that do the real work

Am hitting that with some Python solver libs.

"For security" we have to have all libraries built totally from scratch, one of these ultimately use BLAS code in Fortran.

I don't have an approved Fortran compiler.

In the end we had to rewrite code using just Numpy

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: javascript (seriously?), Python, whatever.

If you enjoy the spawn of Satan, there is a .net / fortran crossover library available... I don't recommend it, but it does exist.

[Rich 2]

Re: javascript (seriously?), Python, whatever.

“There's nothing inherently wrong with either JavaScript…”

Oh yes there is!! JavaScript is a car crash

[captain veg]

Re: javascript (seriously?), Python, whatever.

> JavaScript is a car crash

Well, that's a view. One which seems mostly to be held by people who don't understand what JavaScript actually is, i.e. absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with Java beyond an unfortunate and unhelpful superficial resemblance of syntax.

-A.

[An_Old_Dog]

Complexity Raises Learning- and Enthusiasm-Barriers

When I was in my teens and twenties, I loved assembly language SO MUCH. The opcodes part was simple, and mapped directly to the capabilities of the hardware. It was easy! It was obvious! It was fun! You could just sit down with a CPU manual and find the opcodes which did what you needed, and write out your program.

Then you'd sit down at a terminal or microcomputer console, type it in, save it, invoke the assembler and loader, and run your program. If it crashed on a mainframe, you'd ABEND (IBM) and get a dump ("exchange package" on Control Data 6X00s) look through it for clues, modify your program, and try again.

The two biggest barriers to the youngbloods' self-learning are:

* Huge, excessively-complex, non-orthogonal instruction sets and write-only registers on modern CPUs. It's like the difference between a go-cart powered by a 3.5 horsepower Briggs & Stratton, and a Formula 1 racecar. Yes the F1 racer goes much faster than the go-cart, but it's a lousy learning model. 80x86 is the worst, but PPC, Sony/Motorola BBE/Cell and modern ARM are not far behind. I had such hopes for ARM in that respect, but they blew it.

* Huge, excessively-complex IDE "development environments". Installing and configuring Eclipse and its various bretheren is hellish. The Android SDK is even worse. With the Commodore PETs, 64s and 128s, Atari 400/800/1200 line, Apple ][, and original IBM PC -- just turn it on, and BASIC is there, ready to go.

The kids can't see the forest from the trees. We need to kick some ass in the primary and secondary schools' computer science and programming curricula planners.

(No, I'm not suggesting CompSci majors learn BASIC as a first computer language. I'd suggest an early version of Pascal -- the non-object-oriented, dancing-monkeys, bells-and-whistles version. And let them abuse non-discriminated type unions, and learn when they ought not use them.)

(Icon for, "Yes, I'm a [though clean-shaven] greybeard.")

[joeldillon]

Re: Complexity Raises Learning- and Enthusiasm-Barriers

Modern (64 bit) ARM is a fairly clean RISC in my experience (by which I mean I've written a compiler backend for it for my hobby project). Only really weird thing I've come across is how it encodes immediates for logical operations, I still need to get my head round that, otherwise it is if anything cleaner than ARM classic and definitely more fun to target than Thumb - 16 bit opcodes come with compromises.

[Roland6]

Re: Complexity Raises Learning- and Enthusiasm-Barriers

> ”I'd suggest an early version of Pascal”

Turbo Pascal (with DOSBox) ? (It’s open source, okay needs Windows…)

Delphi Community Edition is also an option.

The question is whether CompSci should expect students to have done some programming at GCSE and/or A-level.

Shame I’m not the owner of the LivingC source code…

[Anonymous Coward]

It depends on the level of training and the quality of university/school, Python alone is not sufficient, but in my B.Sc (2015) I was taught MIPS assembler, C/C++ at esoteric levels, Java, building a CPU pipeline from circuits, in addition to Python. That in addition to network, distributed systems, queueing theory, performance analysis and the unavoidable cache locality etc. I think a key difference are schools / universities that have opinionated profs and are not afraid to fail > 50% of their class, because the topic and bar is set right/hard. But when you then meet CS grads from other universities, the differences in background come out quickly. Quality education need not cost much either, it's quite often not the name/expensive universities that provide the true quality. But do HR systems/managers care?

The cost of living argument is real, when 75% of your paycheck goes to rent alone, why work on open source, even when you care and love it? Especially when one wrongly interpreted message can then be basis for a flamewar or worse, sacking.

[theregisteruser2]

"The cost of living argument is real, when 75% of your paycheck goes to rent alone, why work on open source, even when you care and love it?".

- It's my case. I love open source, but it's too late for me now, not because of paying rent, but due to my advanced age. I'm 29 years old, and I think I should have made all my contributions during university.

[Anonymous Coward]

People said the same about BASIC in the 80's. There's a place for abstracted, higher-level stuff to teach concepts and capabilities and be a gateway to lower levels. ASM is HARD! String handling is particularly annoying to do in asm.

Only a handful projects today actually need asm. Compilers are that good for C/C++ you would be hard pressed to outdo them in many software racing scenarios. That obviously was not the case in the 80s, where if you wanted performance and didn't have unlimited budget, you needed to learn ASM.

The exceptions being the handful of very wealthy outfits that wrote on e.g. a PDP11 and cross-compiled to machine language on target system of choice; for much the same reasons why C/C++ is popular now.

Regarding teaching pointers, Doom's Random Number Generation is a really, really simple example of how to teach one (it's just a lookup table with a pointer, that increments every time it's called).

[Boris the Cockroach]

Can only give this 1 upvote despite knowing exactly where you are coming from

I'm 5 yrs ahead of you and while I only really started looking at 'coding' from 15/16(gawd bless uncle clive and his cheapy computers), then worked my way into making industrial machine tools/robots do my every bidding( mostly because I'm lazy and pressing a few keys to make a turbine blade was a lot easier than doing it by hand ... )

But equally as much one of the youngsters at work remarked that some of the new software available has some nifty functions, and we're stuck a couple of generations behind (lack of cash from the boss), I said "why dont you code it up seeing as you're on the PC/mobile so much?" I may as well have been speaking latin at that point. "Got no idea how" .... sheesh by that point in the conversation 30 years ago I would have already dug up the books and be learning howto do something (even if it was to show up the old farts who said it couldn't be done)

Knocked an algorithm in psudo code out in about 20 mins... will implement it tommorrow and see if it works. but the drive in myself to do that sort of stuff is dying away... only doing it to try and get the youngster interested in learning , sad really but there you go.... one day they'll be old farts going on about how their youngsters dont even have the ability to use a scroll bar to doom scroll farcebok for 6 hrs straight.....

Beer... just because

[FF22]

Realization

Imho it's far simpler than most people think.

The reason why open source is not growing anymore and is actually shrinking, because by now even the most zealous fans have realized, that it was all built on a false premise and offered false promises. OS doesn't really make the world a better place, it just allows others to take advantage of those who have put time and effort into it, without receiving any payment in return. Or if they did, then the whole point of that open source development was to displace competitors and inrcrease demand for complementer products.

Also the source itself is being available is less and less relevant with online services and big data taking over from locally run software. The role of the software itself has become marginal in most cases, and the service and the data are either locked down to begin with, or is not even feasible for everyone wanting to store and process them themselves. Like what use do you have for your media player or codec being open source, if the content you could play with it is only available through online services and takes up petabytes and exabytes of storage? What use is it if the social media app source code is available, if there's only place for one or for a few central social media hubs? What use do you have for open source AI models, when training them requires 1000s of high-end accelerator cards costing >$10.000 each, downloading and storing petabytes of training data, and the resulting model weights are not available openly as is the source? Etc.

Some of use have realized this decades ago - after we have also put several years of hard work into OSS projects -, others are realizing it just now. Open source mostly benefits behemoths like Google, Facebook, Apple, etc. and the most a small everyday guy can get out of it is not having to pay $50 or 100 for a Windows licence. The average developer, who put 1000s of work hours into OS project is even worse off, and is in an actually net negative of several hundred thousands of dollars (when comparing how much he gained through OS, and how much he put into it).

Those who still do open source mostly do it, because

1. they're paid for it (in which case it's not really open source, as originally conceived, and again merely a business tool to disrupt the market, crush competition or generate demand for non-open-source services, parts, etc)

2. they still didn't realize all the above, or are just unable to admit it to themselves. they're considering only their sunk (personal time and effort) costs, and don't want to give up on the (false) idea, because that would also mean admitting to they having wasted large chunks of their lives on said false idea.

The latter people will be slowly too old to contribute and even possibly die, and the former will still be around, but they're not really making open source stuff, and with said rise of the cloud and data the source being available will be getting even less and less irrelevant, than it is today.

I know this post will not be popular (especially amongst "believers"), but it's still he truth, unfortunately.

[Dan 55]

Re: Realization

Open source mostly benefits behemoths like Google, Facebook, Apple, etc.

And where are those behemoths all from? Corporate psychopathy is alive and well. That's the problem, not open source.

Perhaps a solution is something like the FUTO licence which means corporates which use open source projects should pay for them.

[doublelayer]

Re: Realization

Except that most attempts to encode that into a license get something very similar to proprietary. Sure, you can see the source, but we reserve the right to charge you for using it and if you don't pay us, you're breaking a contract. That sounds a lot like what anyone using Oracle Java, or anyone who Oracle thinks might be using Oracle Java, are hearing. Part of open source is that the users are free to use, modify, and redistribute, and they don't have to ask for permission. Yes, there are a few licenses such as the new one that Bruce Perens has been working on which claim to keep those freedoms while still requiring payment, but they're contradictory; either I can redistribute modifications and therefore avoid any requirement to pay, or I can't because it would avoid the requirement to pay. You can't have both.

If it has failed so badly, then stop doing it. I'd be sorry to see that happen, but I can't claim to be a full-time open source dev. I write proprietary for my employer to get money, and then write open source in my free time with the knowledge that I will get little or no money from doing so. But don't tell me you're writing open source then deny users the freedoms that used to provide.

[Dan 55]

Re: Realization

That sounds a lot like what anyone using Oracle Java, or anyone who Oracle thinks might be using Oracle Java, are hearing.

This is different because payment would only apply to those companies or corporations making a profit above a certain value. It certainly wouldn't apply to individual developers, small businesses, NGOs, educational use, etc.

I don't consider a corporate entity in the same way as an individual, any large corporation has the resources to help itself. Corporations can buy in third-party software, spin up some propriety solution in house, or take advantage of open source software which in all probability will be faster to develop for and cheaper and easier to get support for. In exchange I consider it entirely fair that big corporations pony up some money to help maintain it since they're making millions or billions from it.

Far too many open source projects are maintained by one guy on the edge of a nervous breakdown as the open source project gets flooded with new requirements and patches to suit corporations and in return all they manage to do is pull the latest release and then set that release in stone in their projects (they can't even manage to update open source components in a timely fashion because the internal budget doesn't allow for it). Then some huge bug is found and all hell breaks loose.

If a corporation wants is all the money, it can have it. But if it chooses to do that then it shouldn't be able to get a free ride on an open source project which it derives value from but has no intention of paying for, instead what should happen is the choice it makes brings with it the consequence of reducing its options and it only gets to derive value from bought-in third party software or developing its own solution. And that's entirely fair.

[doublelayer]

Re: Realization

The licenses differ on who exactly has to pay, and while Perens's license does have a revenue cap, many of them don't. Many of them don't even define their terms sufficiently so that you know immediately whether something counts. You get vague terms like "commercial use", and if you want to figure out what it means, you have to contact a license person who may not respond and doesn't have any reason to want to give someone the right to use it for free when they might get some money for not doing so.

Or in other words, it's very similar to Oracle. Individual developers and educational programs aren't being asked to pay for Oracle Java. They're the people that Oracle want to use it so that it gets more use afterward and they can start charging everybody else. Their arguments about why are exactly the same as yours.

I would like open source projects to get financial and code donations from companies and individuals who use it, but it is important to me that these be voluntary. Otherwise, the freedoms that are present will necessarily be weakened or discarded. If we make a list of people who can probably pay for their usage, so why not mandate it, it is not hard to find a reason to put you on that list. You have disposable income, I assume. Why shouldn't you pay for all of the stuff you use individually, whatever level the authors, or whichever one gets to decide think is the right value? That's a fine business model, but it's not open source.

[Dan 55]

Re: Realization

Who gets to decide the right value? The programmer who chooses the licence of course. There are people who limit code distribution to non-military use. Others say donate to children in Uganda. Nobody has a problem with that. A clause limiting distribution to corporations who donate is no different and a project leader should be able to set this condition if they want to.

It reminds me of arguments against minimum wage, collective bargaining, and so on, with people maintaining that the corporate largesse and the free market will find fair pay and conditions for everyone, when this is obviously not the case.

Open source needs protection so that it can continue. The GPL is one way of achieving this, but only allowing corporations who donate to use the source code is another. Open source projects exist in the real world and like anything else in the real world they need resources otherwise it will die.

[doublelayer]

Re: Realization

Open source has come to mean something, and it is not that the author simply decides on a license cost and gets to impose it. That's fine as well, but it is different. All I am asking here is for open source to continue to mean what it has meant before, which does not allow for mandatory payment for everyone who uses the software. People who don't write it should not claim to do so.

Otherwise, I must make the following decision. If open source can be redefined to allow anyone to impose restrictive license terms and mandatory payment, then Windows is the most successful open source operating system in existence. By the definitions we have used for decades, this is not true. By the one that lets "open source" mandate payments from users, it is.

[Dan 55]

Re: Realization

The source code to Windows isn't open, apart from leaks which can't legally be used.

Secondly, why are you insisting that some high-profit corporations paying == everyone paying? It's really not the same.

[TheMeerkat]

Re: Realization

The moment you say “corporations can’t use it without paying” you are losing majority of potential users.

The reason why Open Source is so widespread and popular is because it is free for use by corporations.

[robinsonb5]

Re: Realization

The other problem is churn.

Writing software is only half the story - even once it's 100% finished, done, itch successfully scratched, it won't be many years before something changes and it can no longer be built on current systems. I've abandoned software I wrote in the past because the subject was no longer interesting to me (I'm not going to update photo printing software when I no longer have a printer at home) - and I'm not alone in that. My leisure time is limited, I can either spend it exploring new and interesting things or I can spend it maintaining old boring things - I can't do both. If someone wants to pay me to do the latter I might consider it.

Similarly, because of the constant churn, I elected not to target either GCC or LLVM when I started a toy CPU project a couple of years ago - instead using vbcc because it's small, lightweight, and can be built in seconds. The chances are very high that it will be buildable without modification a decade from now.

That's also one of the reasons I'm now into the Retro scene. Just yesterday I revisited an old piece of Amiga code and updated it for use in a new project. There's something quite satisfying about a copyright header in a source file which reads "Copyright (c) 1998, 2014 ...."

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Realization

Hmmmm, then again, one could also be of the opinion that relying solely on closed-source (private), rather than open-source (public), could foster John Deereization of software-driven systems and machines, where private enterprise interests have "total control over everything 24/7, [respect no] privacy, [no] right to repair and [...] they'll be able to pull the strings behind the curtain as they wish", which would not be too good really. Imho, we should make sure that open source code continues to thrive.

[tfewster]

Re: Realization

@FF22 - So true. Open source is a victim of its own success, being mainstream/corporate now, so involvement is "work" rather than "hobby".

Beers for the unsung heroes who created the foundations of Open Source. ---->

NB, "fresh" blood doesn't necessarily mean "young" blood.

[Doctor Syntax]

Re: Realization

"1. they're paid for it (in which case it's not really open source, as originally conceived,"

AFAICS it was originally conceived, in the main, by people in academia who were being "paid", either actual payments or students on whatever student maintenance was applicable. I don't think it was conceived as being the province of any group more restricted than "those able to contribute". Those being paid by, e.g. Intel may be paid to come up with a specific product for their employer. But the academic or student also has a product in mind - the usual academic product of a publication to enhance their career. It's just that releasing a FOSS is an alternative form of publication to the usual academic paper.

[Adair]

Re: Realization

Your 'simple' analysis may, or may not, be close to the truth. Whatever it is it is an analysis of a single aspect of FLOSS usage—the corporate adoption/hijacking of FLOSS.

FLOSS, as a philosophical and practical outworking is far more than that one particular branch, significant as that branch may be to global IT.

The most important reality of FLOSS isn't the 'free, as in beer', but the 'freedom' to write to the code you want to write and to allow others to deploy/modify it.

Whether I spend ten hours or a thousand on my bit of code is irrelevant to my willingness to allow it to be shared. Once I have set that code free it is no concern of mine whether others choose to use it for their financial benefit, or whether anyone (including myself) maintains it. If these things do concern me, I should choose an appropriate license, or not release the code under any kind of FLOSS basis—I am entitled to make my code proprietary if I want to.

There is clearly a problem for ongoing maintenance and development of important FLOSS projects, but that is a downstream issue, separate from the significance of FLOSS as a principle and as an objective practice.

No code has an intrinsic right to exist, however useful/remunerative anyone finds it.

The purpose of FLOSS is to provide a playing field, not to determine who plays on it or for how long.

[cornetman]

Re: Realization

> The most important reality of FLOSS isn't the 'free, as in beer', but the 'freedom' to write to the code you want to write and to allow others to deploy/modify it.

It does madden me the obsession that some commentators have about remuneration and how corps are getting a free ride, so therefore "bad". I'm sure it is a cultural blind spot.

That might matter for some, but the freedom *is* the whole point for me. Telling me that it's bad for companies to be using my code without paying for it is by design, and that somehow I am deluded or doing humanity a disservice or some other b*llocks.

[Dan 55]

Re: Realization

Then release your source code projects under the BSD or MIT licence and job done.

Other people don't want to do that and there should be a way of ensuring that they have the freedom of enforcing whatever conditions they want on their code too. The licence and the code are indivisible, you make your choice whether or not to use an open source project based on both.

[Yet Another Anonymous coward]

Re: Realization

>Then release your source code projects under the BSD or MIT licence and job done.

It very much depends on how the code will be used.

I work on OpenCV, both at work and as a long time contributor. It's BSD licensed and this works, because a lot of the systems it goes into are propriety and couldn't use it with a more 'open'

license. Instead everyone would implement the subset of image processing they needed for their project and the community would be a worse place. Instead people can keep their usage private but most still contribute fixes back to the project.

If Linux was BSD/MIT I suspect every computer maker would have their own proprietary Linux and we would still be in the 90s Unix wars but every workstation maker having their own Linux flavour.

[doublelayer]

Re: Realization

And anybody can write basically any license terms they want. Just don't write license terms that boil down to "I own it. If you want it, you have to pay me, unless you're suitably small in which case I'll give you a limited noncommercial license" and call it open source. Lots of tech companies have that license. We call it yet another proprietary license. I've agreed to that license many times. It is not what open source means, and anyone using similar terms while trying to claim credit as an open source contributor is being dishonest.

[Dan 55]

Re: Realization

Maybe Redis should never have been an open source project in the first place. Or maybe there should be a way of making sure corporations which sell $90bn of services/year like Amazon contribute to the projects that put them in that position in the first place.

Nobody's saying small means noncommercial use. Let's compare it to the EU's DMA gatekeeper status. Those that are big enough to not find it a burden should play their part in maintaining a healthy ecosystem. Many do, many don't. Those that don't, should, and such a clause would make them consider the value that each open source project brings to their business before deciding whether or not to use those projects.

The fact that Bruce Perens is looking at this means it is a problem that needs addressing. Rejecting licences which specify corporate contributions is perhaps holding on to a romanticised view of open source.

[doublelayer]

Re: Realization

Would it be open source if I wrote a license that says the following:

In order to use this at all, no matter where you got it, you must pay me all the money in your bank account.

In order to distribute modifications, you must charge everyone who receives it, whether from you directly or not, and send the money to me?

Hey, the source is still there for you to read. You can still modify it. Isn't that open source by your definition?

By the definition we have used, there are important freedoms that are lost. The freedom to modify and distribute without seeking permission from the original author being an important one. The problem of companies not donating to projects they use does not change the fact that, if you fix it by removing the freedoms, you have done a lot of harm to those who benefited from those freedoms and made yourself not unlike those companies, because you have taken the contributions of others in order to make a profit from the users without giving anything to them.

If you don't want users to have those freedoms, you have the choice not to give them those freedoms. Proprietary software is not evil. However, don't take them away and try to pretend that you have not. There is a reason that open source software is often preferable to proprietary, but proprietary software masquerading as open source is not.

[Dan 55]

Re: Realization

In order to use this at all, no matter where you got it, you must pay me all the money in your bank account.

In order to distribute modifications, you must charge everyone who receives it, whether from you directly or not, and send the money to me?

Hey, the source is still there for you to read. You can still modify it. Isn't that open source by your definition?

Isn't that taking the argument to extremes? If the limit is set to all those corporations which earn e.g. $1m or more, I do think that is a reasonable compromise.

There are corporations which won't use GPLv3 open source software because that is a step too far for them, which is why Apple changed from an ancient version of bash (the last version under GPLv2) to zsh (MIT). I don't see anyone getting cut up about Apple dropping bash, apart perhaps end users that are annoyed that Apple are screwing up their scripts while they play politics with licences.

If there were some GPLv2 + corporate donation licence and Apple were to have dropped bash because of that, would this have been worse than Apple dropping bash because of GPLv3? I think most people would have shrugged and said "don't let the door hit you on the way out".

[doublelayer]

Re: Realization

Yes, it is taking it to extremes to point out why open source and free software forbid it. There is a reason why the definitions do not allow for discrimination against fields of endeavor or permit mandatory payment no matter where the software came from. They forbid this to protect important freedoms.

If you agree that a mandatory payment from anyone full stop is not open source, then even when that payment is mandatory on a smaller set of users that doesn't include you, it is doing the same thing. It should also be clear that, if we let any author set their own terms for who has to pay, that group can grow to include you at the whim of the author. What stops me, as an author of open source software, from deciding that you should be paying as well. After all, you're not the proverbial resident of the third world earning $2 per day, so you could afford to toss some money my way and I'm going to make sure you do. The truth is that you probably could give me some money, and that's why there is a donation button, but that if I wanted to be able to require you to pay me for my work, I would have sold this software as a product. There is a fundamental disconnect between an open source project, which anyone can develop and distribute, and something that a single person or organization can own and sell. Open source software has been dealing with this problem for decades, and it has been important to clarify that it is not the same as big companies who release some source, but if you so much as look at it without permission, they'll try to charge you license payments. That difference is as important, if not more, if some authors of formerly open source change to that model.

[Dan 55]

Re: Realization

They forbid this to protect important freedoms.

Just like the absolute freedom to bear arms and absolute freedom or speech, absolutes end up causing more harm than good.

In this case corporations making billions in profit from open source projects and generating more work for the project but not giving them any money causes harm.

What stops me, as an author of open source software, from deciding that you should be paying as well.

Nothing, but arguably as someone who believes in open source you wouldn't do that anyway. Neither would anyone else.

All it's about is ensuring that corporations making a healthy profit from a project invest in the project that they derive value from to ensure its continued existence. That's all. I'd have thought any corporation would have enough enlightened self-interest do that anyway but many don't.

The absolute freedom to allow large corporations to ransack open source and return nothing is not one I'm interested in upholding.

[doublelayer]

Re: Realization

"Nothing, but arguably as someone who believes in open source you wouldn't do that anyway. Neither would anyone else."

Yes, as someone who believes in actual open source, I wouldn't. The people who mandate payment don't, hence why they violate every definition and tradition of open source, and they easily could. Why wouldn't they when they could theoretically get more money by doing so? The companies that switched from open source licenses to faux-open ones didn't universally limit the "who has to pay" set to big cloud providers. Some of them changed it to all commercial use at all. They did this, taking the work of all the independent contributors for free and making a profit from it. The thing you're accusing the big companies of doing actually applies better to people who switch the licenses.

"In this case corporations making billions in profit from open source projects and generating more work for the project but not giving them any money causes harm."

There's a great thing to do about this: don't do the extra work they generate. They want a feature added and have requested it but nobody else needs it? Hey guys, how about you find a programmer to write it or you pay us to do it. And if you do get a programmer to write it and it requires a lot of reviewing, we might not do that either unless you pay us, so choose between having your own version with your feature or donating some cash so it can be upstreamed and you have less maintenance work in your future. There, you have a method of getting resources from any person or company that is actually increasing the workload, but you're not doing that by abandoning the freedoms.

People use all sorts of licenses with random or counterproductive terms. Someone writes some software, but they have a bone to pick with the UK, so they state that UK-based individuals or companies are forbidden from using it. Yes, the UK is not the most common country subjected to this, but the point remains. There is a reason why we have made clear that that is not open source. Similar modifications aren't either. You can do anything you want, but I prefer to use, write, and contribute with money, code, or other support to projects where those freedoms remain, and I am well aware that if you start taking them away from someone, you will eventually take them away from someone I care about.

[TheMeerkat]

Re: Realization

If Redis was not Open Source, nobody today would know what Redis was.

It is the promise of being free that undermines competitors who want to make a living out of their product.

[teebie]

Re: Realization

"OS doesn't really make the world a better place"

Having viable operating systems and browsers that aren't controlled by Microsoft, Apple and Google does make the world a better place.

[FF22]

Re: Realization

"Having viable operating systems and browsers that aren't controlled by Microsoft, Apple and Google does make the world a better place."

You claim is based on the false premise that

1. there weren't operating systems and browsers available before open source, that weren't controlled by Microsoft, Apple and Google, and that

2. operating systems and browsers aren't currently controlled by Microsoft, Apple and Google, just because of open source.

In fact they are, and they have been for decades. Open source has not changed a tiny bit about this. Even open source projects like Linux or Chromium are in the end still controlled by Microsoft, Apple and Google (because they pay the developers who ultimately put new stuff into these) - and more importantly: they (ie. these open source projects) are used by them to retain control of and shape the market.

It is actually the open source nature of these projects that gives Microsoft, Apple and Google even more control than before over the operating system and and browser market, because now that these types of software have become not only a cheap but an essentially free commodity, thanks to open source, nobody could possibly enter the market of OSes or browsers and make a dent in it, let alone disrupt it. Even mega corporations like Microsoft have failed at that with for ex. Windows Phone or with their EdgeHTML-based Edge browser.

And that's the problem. Open source would be only beneficial to us, as a society, if it would foster competition and innovation. But we see the opposite of that. What we see is that - as already explained - open source is mostly used to stifle and drive out competition, gain control over a market, and create demand for omplementary goods that have nothing open-source about them (because they're services, hardware or data, that are not open sourced, and not even replicable or feasible at individual level). Individual people are essentially unable to take advantage of open source, but large mega corporations benefit from them enourmously, because they raise the barrier to entry of any competing commercial entity enormously, and because they can take advantage of them at scale.

[bazza]

Re: Realization

Indeed so.

There are some good reasons for companies to get involved in open source projects. For example, Intel puts effort into the Linux kernel to ensure that the kernel works well on their chips. Same goes for IBM. Or it could be to ensure that an OSS project interacts well / is fully featured when dealing with the company's offered services, so that they can sell more of those services.

But the practical reality is that OSS projects that get dominated by a company are just an extension of the company's business policy.

IBM through their ownership of RedHat are currently in the process of taking Linux "closed source". Many would protest that they're not - the Linux kernel project is still out there, untainted. However, IBM/RH dominate the Gnome and SystemD projects, and are in a financial position to acquire or dominate Ubuntu. If they can acquire Ubuntu or force that distro to whither away (e.g. by applying the same rules to SystemD / Gnome as they now do to RHEL), then the only major line of distro left is RH [It would be very expensive for Ubuntu to fork Gnome / SystemD and take them off in their own direction].

If all we were left with by the way of distributions was Fedora / RHEL, whilst the Linux kernel project may still exist independently no one would be running it; they'd be running the Fedora / RHEL version.

[ecofeco]

Re: Realization

The bottom line is: who can afford to?

More people than ever are struggling just to pay the rent. Any free time is either involuntary unemployment or spent looking for another or even second job. And any remaining time is spent trying to catch a few moments of rest and relaxation.

And there is the ever increasing tedious hoops to jump through just to take care of daily personal responsibility. Self service everything with opaque rules, anyone?

My personal experience is that I have very limited time to learn something new. I will therefore spend that time learning something I like. Coding is not one of them. The learning curve is both long AND steep.

[Dennis_the_performance_dork]

Victims of our success

I agree to a large extent, but I think you missed the elephant in the room. Linux and OSS are EASY now. You don't have to build your own kernel, don't have to tune the tulip driver to get your network card to work, don't have to stare at weird system calls in C just to get things going. I started on Slackware, ./configure, make config, make, make install. And pray it worked.

Now, Fedora and Ubuntu magically update with RPM and DEB. Need a database? Postgress and Maria are on par with Oracle and DB2. Need an office suite to do spreadsheets and documents? LIbre is imho better than MS Office. The tool chain I use to build software works 100% better on my Fedora laptop than on my Windoze desktop, despite the desktop having much more capability. Video codecs and web browsers all work fine. It's just, well, as I said, Easy! I'm doing an update on Fedora right now, and it's easier than the last time I updated Windows.

So what's the incentive, other than just intellectual curiosity, to go in and tweak things, maybe throw a patch out or do a git pull? Then you have personalities who like, enjoy even, belittling and berating new contributors rather than supporting them and helping them along the OSS path. And then you have Canonical and Big Purple Hat making it so super convenient. . .

We did OSS development back in the day because we had to, and it was small. Now it's big and corporate.

[Dimitri]

Re: Realization

That’s missing a significant point though. And that is that the financial benefit of open source seem small because of the lack of a comparison point.

What makes you think these corporate giants wouldn’t completely close off the markets in which they hold a strong position and proceed to (a) massively rip off their customers (little guys especially) and (b) stifle innovation down to a trickle by the absence of competition (because there wouldn’t be any, after they set up a cartel for every single software market)?

They did that during the 80s and 90s and they still try as much as they can with their business models, as soon as they feel they have a captive client base e.g. apple, google, adobe, oracle.

The OSS ecosystem is enormously valuable to the world not only by providing alternatives, but also providing an entry point for new developers to get into areas that would otherwise be completely esoteric and accelerating innovation.

In essence they enable the basic principles of scientific research to apply in a field where intellectual property legislation, would have otherwise killed it long ago.

Now if you feel tired, it’s fine to hand off the batton to someone else, but otherwise let’s not throw out the baby with the bathwater.

[Paul Crawford]

Closed source community?

There are serious issues in getting and educating new talented staff. While open source's problems are apparent to world+dog, how does this compare to closed source equivalents?

Based on the piss-poor quality of MS products (and patches) in recent years I suspect not much better, but has anyone got insight as to how the development models actually compare in practice?

[Dan 55]

Re: Closed source community?

IBM's certainly having problems finding new staff, in part because they don't seem to quite know how to go about it.

[Doctor Syntax]

Re: Closed source community?

What they don't know about will largely be how to fix their reputation for dumping employees rather than paying them what their experience is worth.

[bazza]

Re: Closed source community?

And their bad reputation for abusing and financially conning the ones they keep.

What goes around, comes around. Look like an arsehole to work for, people will stop working for you. You'd think that, in an age where skilled talent of many sorts is hard to find in the jobs market, you'd treat your staff with soft gloves lest you create the very situation that IBM is in... And with IBM in particular, given their historic position on employing all manner of people from all manner of backgrounds on equal terms, it's a real pity.

[bazza]

Re: Closed source community?

To some extent there is as many problems in closed source companies as there are in open source projects. It's very hard to find people willing to be good at maintaining.

I see it in my place. No one wants to maintain code, not even their own. Personally, I blame delivery-dopamine; people get a rush out of delivering something new. Do that once, they want to do only that. The result is that they do lots of little jobs. What they miss out on is the mega rush of delivering truly large projects, because no one trusts them to work on such things that really will have to be maintained (and in our domain, it's expert maintenance, not just a few library updates).

The one advantage a closed source shop has is that, if it has to, it can pay its way out of a maintenance issue. There are contractors out there who essentially specialise in coming in, getting their heads round someone else's mess, and fixing problems.

[Adair]

Re: Closed source community?

'Do one thing, and do it well'—now where have I come across that mantra before?

[Doctor Syntax]

I think Steven's problem is going to what sounds like an old fart's conference (I speak as a very old fart myself) and being surprised to find himself surrounded by old farts and specifically those of the conference-going variety. If there are any Linus clones beavering away somewhere would they have been invited? Would they have the funds to go if invited? If they were funded to go would they have stayed after taking a quick look at what was on offer?

[Dreadedhill]

Who travels international to a conference?

Bunch of old farts, that want to meet face to face. Younger folk are more used to online

[Anonymous Coward]

Youngsters these days don't even drink, so the concept of getting drunk in a bar with one's industry chums isn't a draw anymore. Sorry times I tell you.

[Pete 2]

SIGQUIT

The age of a developer is not a particularly important issue. Though their level of experience might be.

What does matter is who is going to support all this stuff when the original authors make their final exit()

[bazza]

Re: SIGQUIT:SIGHACK

That's easy. No one...

Really, it will be no one. Linux will become a RH product.

[Captain Hogwash]

In my experience young people don't actually see the value of free and open source software. Trying to explain it to them results in them looking at me like I have two heads.

They're so used to phone apps which are free as in beer which monitor their every breath that it seems normal. Anyone who questions it must be up to no good.

[doublelayer]

This implies that you've had success explaining the benefits to older people. Have you really?

In my experience, explaining the benefits of open source tends to fail with people of all ages if they don't write code or do something very similar themselves. Some people grasp the idea of "you could theoretically fix it yourself", more people grasp the idea of "you don't have to pay for it", but I have had little success explaining why the freedom to modify and distribute at will is important to me. Unfortunately, given some conversations elsewhere in this thread, I think I'm failing to explain that to someone who presumably has technical knowledge already. I have not noticed this being any harder to explain to young people. I know many young programmers who understand and agree with the goals of open source and many old non-developers who think it's really cute how I'm into this open free thing I just made up, but it surely could never go anywhere because all the software running the internet is owned by big businesses, right.

[Anonymous Coward]

As with the other commenter below, I doubt that many people - young or old - get the argument. The imposition of espionage in the name of advertising is quite ludicrous. I swear gadgets are listening to conversations to decide on advertising, let alone search history. But what does that mean for the listening in on thousands of conversations in offices?

FB thinks I like bikes, which is technically true, so every other advert is for some luminous spandex. Heaven forbid someone use a bike to do a 1/2 mile trip round the corner in a t-shirt and jeans. Liking cycling does not have to mean being a TDF-wannabe.

Windows and Android are just things that you get when you buy your hardware, ergo you use them.

A twenty-something friend of ours bought a pile of PC components and wondered why it didn't boot called for my help. I was happy to solve the hardware and prove it was working with a linux install that took less than 5 mins to do. Software, I was not going to touch with a bargepole. If they want Windows, they can learn to install it themselves, just like the rest of us had to do. I am *not* becoming the beck-and-call PC fixer, especially for that POS.

[Throatwarbler Mangrove]

Not really shocking

Reading the comments here, with their "kids today" attitude, it's unsurprising that younger programmers aren't excited by working with crotchety, cynical old men who wax nostalgic about how they used to carve ones and zeros by hand out of copper plates and react negatively to the very idea of change, much less innovation. Ideally, the older generation would reach out to the younger with opportunities to learn, but if the youth are being met with the contempt and ridicule expressed in this comment thread, of course they're going to pursue other interests, and that's without considering other problems, such as needing to make an income and the unpleasantness of dealing with the toxic ideological infighting which pervades Open Source.

[Orv]

Re: Not really shocking

It reminds me of when I went to a local science fiction book club, as a college student, and heard nothing but tales of how great the club was in the 1980s. For an hour. Needless to say I didn't go back; why join something when it's clear its best days are behind it?

Everyone's heard stories about how prickly and combative open source communities are. Why would you sign up to work for free for something like that?

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Not really shocking

Can you imagine how bad the closed-source communities are; ones enforced by HR departments and timesheets...

Yeah, I'll stick to open, thank you.

[JamesTGrant]

Re: Not really shocking

Copper plates? Luxury!

Back in my day we had to scrape out the noughts and ones by gnawing bone.

[unlocked]

Open Source isn't conferences

I don't think the problem here is a lack of talented young people interested in open source, but rather a lack of being able to find them. A lot of young people hang out online, and interact with other young people who also hang out online. Rather than hoping new maintainers will randomly show up at conferences, the older generation needs to seek out the younger generation where they are. I'm sure there are a bunch of youngsters who would love to learn from older developers and take over big projects, but just have no idea that there's a need.

[Dan 55]

Re: Open Source isn't conferences

They have no idea because they are safely wrapped in a cocoon of Windows/MacOS/ChromeOS/Android/iOS.

Perhaps the open source offering should be improved, to show more practical examples of what open source can do and making it as easy as possible to try it out especially in the mobile space.

[JRStern]

A little too open

I've recommended some newbies get into OS but as an oldie never done so myself, beyond a couple of quick looks and SMH, but maybe it's over now. Thought some newbies could dip into OS as a backdoor for job seekers, find projects your employer sponsors, hack a bit competently, and there you are.

Otherwise always thought of it as hobbyist stuff, or super-cheap employers (of which there are many).

Professional quality work takes effort, and frankly few young people are going to be able to deliver on that.

And fewer will have the spare time to do it, unless there's major remuneration involved.

Much less go to meat meetings IRL.

[BinkyTheMagicPaperclip]

Look at what is being offered, and open source user entitlement

The issues here have existed for thirty years and never been addressed. The root cause is funding and the general userbase's attitude to non mass market operating systems.

Everyone, but especially younger people, want to be able to contribute something measurable with minimal levels of hassle and receive a notable benefit in return. That benefit could well be money, it might be the ability to gain a job from the work, or it could be (bwahahahaha) gratitude from the wider world[1].

There's usually insufficient documentation, resource, mentorship, and funding to contribute. There's also insufficient support for admin, maintenance, and QA. The tools are better these days though.

Back in the 90s open source as we know it was new. The message the major open source luminaries presented was 'free as in speech'. What almost everyone heard was 'free as in beer'. That's largely STILL what they hear, and still what appears to be pushed if you go to Linux distribution websites. At least FreeBSD has a prominent 'donate' button on its home page.

How well are FreeBSD donations working? Outside the major partners, it's appalling. There should be thousands of people contributing a little to influence its direction, instead there's under two hundred. Given that, is it any surprise that major open source successes such as Linux have their direction largely driven by and funded by large corporates, with insufficient support for lone contributors?

It's human nature but there is an appalling sense of entitlement among users - they expect everything to match or better the cost and functionality of the mass market, which is largely Windows and Android. It was true in the 90s with OS/2 users[2], and it's still true now, especially seeing as all operating systems are now 'free' for all intents and purposes.

So, what's the solution? I don't claim to have many answers here but :

FUNDING. At least start putting prominent donate buttons and change the conversation that the user base should start paying money. Start paying developers and especially support staff. I suspect that whilst a developer can perhaps use their code as part of a showcase, and possibly people that write documentation also could, the chance of people on support, bug tracking, administration etc being able to use their contribution in a job application is very low - *pay them money*

Hackathons. It's worked very well for OpenBSD. Defined goals, things to promote, mentorship on tap.

GSOC (Google Summer of Code) equivalents. Defined functionality that can be promoted and delivered.

Voting and community engagement. Use some of the funding to prioritise functionality based on community desires - note only *some* funding, so that worthy but less popular features can still be funded.

Documentation. Oh dear elder gods, write some documentation.

Co-operation between projects and different OS in terms of functionality *cough* Wayland. hahaha. hahahahahahah. bwahaahahah. Sorry, the chance of saying to Linux Wayland 'you can't do this without thinking of BSD or small compositors (rather than the large desktop environments)' seems unthinkable, but I can dream.

Finally, because I've not thrown enough hand grenades into this conversation already, look at Windows. It's fantastic, really it is. Yes, as an OS it's annoying, you're beholden to Microsoft for functionality, feature deprecation, have to use its compositor and for all intents and purposes its desktop environment. The APIs are extensive though, the documentation is comprehensive, the support for internationalisation and accessibility is rather good. For the most part DLL conflicts and mismatching components has been a non problem for years[3]. This is what happens when a huge amount of money is thrown at functionality, backwards compatibility, developer tools, documentation, and support.

[1] I'm sure this exists, especially among open source peers, but it will be largely outweighed by hassle.

[2] Yes, this a hobby horse I can't let go of. 'Why do I have to pay for drivers when Windows users get it for free?' 'Why do I have to pay more for a package with fewer but higher quality functions than the Windows alternative?'. People do not want to know about economies of scale and development costs included in a purchase price.

[3] Then you look at the Unix alternatives and despair. At one point Unix laughed at Windows, now I install a package in FreeBSD, hope it doesn't break something else, and that if it does an update of everything will fix it again. This is pathetically fragile.

[Bluck Mutter]

Re: Look at what is being offered, and open source user entitlement

So I am a reasonable competent C/C++ programmer, developed large and complex mission critical "close to the box" green field applications, have good work practices etc etc.

Retired early at 59 and thought once I got through a small back log of personal stuff I would contribute to some FOSS projects that tickled my fancy.

Downloaded the code for some of these to look around and basically ZERO inline comments.

This was a total turn off.. code bases of 1 million+ lines of code with no inline comments makes it basically impossible to find your way around and self learn.

Sure if I joined the project they MIGHT have some roadmaps as to what is what but after banging away working at the coal face for 42 years, I dont then want to face the same in a FOSS project.

Sure I expected there would be a learning curve but lack of inline comments says something (a lot) to me about the development ethos of the projects.

Peter

[Will Godfrey]

Re: Look at what is being offered, and open source user entitlement

On the other hand, I've seen code with so many unnecessary comments that it's virtually unreadable.

I prefer a small-ish block of description at the top of significant functions, then exactly one statement per line with meaningful labels - none of this spaghetti of highly compressed statements stacked tightly on a single line.

I also like to see an associated documentation directory, with flow charts and individual plain text files explaining more obscure practices (and their reasons).

[gnasher729]

Re: Look at what is being offered, and open source user entitlement

“ On the other hand, I've seen code with so many unnecessary comments that it's virtually unreadable.”

And this problem has such a simple solution. Write an editor that doesn’t just display a text file, but that automatically adjusts it to my preferences. If I like to write long comments, I switch the editor into “long comment” mode and add long comments. If you prefer minimal comments you switch to “minimal comments” mode. Use setting for brackets, tabs, and so on, but they don’t change the source code, they just change what it looks like on my screen.

A small example today is Xcode + Swift. You take a source file and switch to “display interface”. All code is gone. All private methods are gone. You only see what the user of this file needs to see.

[BinkyTheMagicPaperclip]

Re: Look at what is being offered, and open source user entitlement

I'm certainly not an expert in open source code, but documentation and quality are highly variable when I've looked. Lots of use of grep and web searching are required.

Problem is, for unpaid open source contributors they want to solve their problem as a priority, and extensive documentation takes time away from coding - people don't want to pick up those tasks either.

For open source projects driven by a company where there are free versions and paid for with consultancy and non free components versions, documentation and comments increase the likelihood someone will fork the project and bleed away revenue from the company. So there's no impetus to improve things there either.

I'm minded to do some open source contribution myself, but understandably it's a slow process that I'm fitting round other things I want to do. Still, the fact I want to move to FreeBSD but it frequently annoys the snot out of me makes me want to at least round off some of its roughest edges that affect me.

[bazza]

Re: Look at what is being offered, and open source user entitlement

Such is the price of the "the code documents itself" ethos, followed by (amongst others) I think the Linux kernel project.

It is a tricky balance in projects were resources are tight; more code = better software, but more documentation = longer lived software. What to do?

Years ago I heard that a good metric for properly written / developed / documented code was 1 line of code per day per programmer. It sounds ridiculous, but I can really believe it. Documentation takes up a ton of time, if you're going to document tests, document the results, document the code design, document the code implementation, and finally document the documentation. Yet without that an outsider doesn't stand a chance.

It's also why code-rewriting is common place. It literally is quicker to start from scratch than to work out what had been done in a poorly documented project.

Projects that avoid in-code comments are wasting opportunities. Documentation always helps, and there's a ton of tools these days like doxygen that can easily turn source code comments into structured, searchable, consumable documentation, even with pictures. If you can get programmers to at least doxygenify their code (a tough ask I know), you can at least get something out of it.

I have seen tools like Sparx's Enterprise Architect get used for things like this. They can ingest a pile of source code and create UML diagrams from it. It's not the greatest, but it does help. Some IDEs will understand the structure of code too. But, none of it is a replacement for developer documentation saying why the code is the shape it is, and what's supposed to be going on.

[fajensen]

Re: Look at what is being offered, and open source user entitlement

What did ChatGPT have to say about the code?

[J.G.Harston]

Ok, put your money where your mouth is. Point us to the job adverts.

[Fruit and Nutcase]

Cause and Effect

wet-behind-the-ears developers to the Linux kernel.

Effect: Linus is going to end up with a coronary when they start running amok

[EricB123]

Someone Start a YouTube Chanel About Open Source...

While I don't maintain open source these days, this article reminded me of classical music concerts. Every time I go to a concert, I notice the average of the audience must be at least 60. A few years ago, two frustrated young orchestra violinists started a YouTube channel calledTwoSetViolin. Basically, they play classical music peppered with assorted mayhem antics. They have amassed quite a following, and started playing concerts to sold out venues. While I don't have any numbers, this has to get young people interested in classical music.

Think about it. Big corporations have HR departments that bring in new hires to replace those that retire, die or just plain quit. Open source needs something like that to pull younger generations into open source coding as well. This is every bit as important as the actual coding. Otherwise, open source will just become a part of history.

[Mike 125]

Hard work? Ask Linus

"Yes, creating Linux and open source software is rewarding, but it's also hard work."

Ask Linus if creating Linux felt like hard work back in the day.

Then ask him what maintaining it feels like now.

Bright young people need to feel the excitement of creating something new, and/or different. Maintaining millions of lines of code can never give them that excitement. And we're wrong to expect that it should.

Embedded system software is a good starting point- where one person or small team over time, can build and own the whole damn shooting match, including network stack. They can see it, from the bare metal upwards, doing real stuff on the real Internet. It won't pay the grown-up bills, but the kids will then at least know how it feels.

None of this addresses the 'greying issue'!! No answers there from one such.

But the kids will probably find a solution- with some of the sheer grunt taken by AI...

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Hard work? Ask Linus

I agree. Much of what my professional career is what I call unfun work. But, I do that so I can get to the fun bits where I learn and share while doing something new with the team or individually. I think this is why the new languages rename old concepts, to try to differentiate them from what the old heads are doing... when really, it is flipping the same bits.

[Anonymous Coward]

While I wait for the worms

can't wait until the first kernel module written in scratch is pulled.

[naive]

Creating and the generation of instant gratification

Vintage car shows are also mainly populated by grey beards, it seems that everything involving some form of wrenching, be it digital or physical, only seems to attract greybeards.

When the greybeards were young in the 1970's, they bought a run down Ford Capri from the money they had saved, needing weekends to keep it running.

Generation smart phone takes a loan, or signs a private lease contract to get a new car, since oily fingers is the last thing they want.

It works similar with open source, generation smart phone grew up in a world where US Big Tech seems to be able to translate their thoughts into Amazon packages delivered next day. So why bother creating software ?.

The saving grace for Open-Source will be the people who do not want to fork over endless amounts of money to US Big Tech so they can be spied on by US government, current political developments may boost those numbers.

[harrys]

if only we stopped ridiculous assett rises... house prices in particular

imagine a open source community like in the past where they could afford to be a community :(

[oldherl]

Where's the money?

It's not that young people are not willing to contribute to Open Source community. It's that they can't just do it for free and pay for the rent and food with a ever-growing price tag.

You want more "fresh blood" in your project? Good. Put your money on the table. Offer some full-time jobs for that. No money? Sorry, the young people will get a job elsewhere to make a living. That's how this world works today.

[CapeCarl]

American Py: "No I don't know how a computer actually works"

American Py(thon) // Carl Mclean

A long long time ago

I can still remember how

Those registers used to make me smile

And I knew if I had my chance

That I could make that CPU dance

And maybe the users would be happy for a while

But February made me shiver

With every module I'd deliver

Bad news on the single-step

I couldn't take one more step

I can't remember if I cried

When I read about his core-dumped hide

Something touched me deep inside

The day the registers died

So

Bye, bye Miss American Py

Walked my MacBook to the immersion cooled vat but the vat was dry

And them good ole boys were coding in C and AI

Singin' this'll be the day that my threads die

This'll be the day that my threads die

[cjcox]

Using "old guy" ideas to get "young people"?

Telling younger audiences to "come to my conference" is akin to giving them a "mix tape".

With that said, there's always the "money plays". This would be for anything "hip", like AI or K8s or DevOps, etc. If anyone thinks they'll magically get a huge salary upgrade, perhaps they'll do whatever you say. Even figure out how to listen to your "mix tape".

The idea of live "groups" for the purpose of "networking" and beyond... again, these are "old guy" concepts.

I think there are even bigger issues, the fact that young people have zero interest in computing, or perhaps I should say, computing that requires thought. Everything has become a "cut and paste" to get a "flashy response", without knowledge. That is now what an IT specialist has become.

The advent of LLMs and AI is making that perhaps worse. The ability to Google-Fu something (what I just referred to as an IT specialist) vs the ease of "AI" producing and possibly executing the "cut and paste"....

[david 12]

Let it go

Tired old men maintaining tired old code., and a creaking 50 yr old OS design.

[The Man Who Fell To Earth]

Re: Let it go

You mean maintaining FOSS isn't the "killer app" for AI? Say it ain't so!

[CowHorseFrog]

Problem is people are too busy bullshitting these days, faking things with slides/presentations rather than actually building things themselves.

[withQuietEyes]

Open-source could stand to accept the new blood it gets

As one of the young ones - you need to accept that open source doesn't attract geniuses. They'll use it, but there are other new and interesting things for them to work on. Those of us who are interested in open source are, well, average. A bit slow, not great at getting engaged in things without guidance or motivators or *someone who'll talk us through it*. If you keep trying to motivate young geniuses to work on open source, you'll get nowhere. They're off making hundreds of thousands of dollars in cutting-edge computing and AI research. Focus on teaching the B- students why and how to contribute.

And yes, that means answering a lot of dumb questions. Or accepting that open source is going to have a much smaller base of maintainers in the future.

[Dropper]

Not likely

You're asking the people under the age of 30 to prove they know anything about technology beyond the use of a few smart phone apps?

Coding requires the ability to read, understand complex equations and it's a world where typos matter.

It requires the ability to concentrate on a task for longer than 5 minutes and the willingness to be beaten up and bullied over arbitrary and unreasonable deadlines.

I just don't see why anyone from the last two generations would be interested in this kind of work, and honestly I don't blame them. It's utterly crap, raises your blood pressure to unhealthy levels and has a non-existent work/lifestyle balance. There is no balance, six pounds of lead on sitting by itself on one side of a scale is more balanced.

[Mythical Ham-Lunch]

Re: Not likely

But is six pounds of lead more or less balanced than six pounds of feathers?