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Comment on Why are there so many graybeards in FOSS?

It’s ultimately a question of money. Older guys with software engineering degrees and fancy salaries can spend their weekends doing free community service in the form of open-source development. Younger people have to worry about job and rent and bills, they simply don’t have that kind of free time.

Add to that the growing complexity of the software. Something that could be done by an university student before, like writing an OS from scratch, won’t be nearly as useful as it would in the '90-s, because it was already done before, now you have multiple OSes to choose from. And joining an existing software project is hit-or-miss, some are inclusive and some are an old boy club where you need to know the secret rules.

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balder1991@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
There’s no denial that money has a huge role on it, especially because open source software has contributions mostly from North America and Western Europe.

But about older guys being more available, I wouldn’t be so sure. That would be a nice case to study. Because the older you get, often the less inclined you are to spend your free time on something like that.

I believe what happens with these people is that the projects are truly their passion, and they come from a different landscape where software development wasn’t something mainstream. I remember some comment on HN where the user talked about how there was a “coolness” to it in the sense of being something new and unexplored, the internet was a place for like-minded people that loved information technology, they had the chance to create a lot of things that have become established today.

Now software development isn’t the same as it used to be in general perception, I guess. The influx of capital that made the startup scene boom and made everyone and their grandmother to learn to code sucked out part of the passion from the field. Nowadays you have a lot of professional programmers who don’t know anything beyond their immediate IDE and programming language. There isn’t a sense of discovery any more, cause it feels like any project is a copycat (another todo app), while the important projects have grown super complex and are managed by organizations instead of lone programmers.

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masterspace@lemmy.ca ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
One aspect of FOSS that most people don’t appreciate is how it’s funded. Like how it’s actually funded.

Once you put a dollar value to the hours put into it, it fairly quickly becomes apparent that most FOSS projects are basically only possible because super rich software engineers (relative to the average person) have the relative luxury to be able to dedicate a ton of free time and effort to building something they think should exist.

It’s why there was a huge FOSS boom after the dot com crash when a ton of software engineers suddenly got laid off but were relatively wealthy enough to not have massive pressure to immediately start grinding a 9-5 again.

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- balder1991@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  
  It’s why there was a huge FOSS boom after the dot com crash when a ton of software engineers suddenly got laid off
  
  I’d be interested in a source on that.
  
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- Venator@lemmy.nz ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  
  got laid off but were relatively wealthy enough to not have massive pressure to immediately start grinding a 9-5 again
  
  Or they were grinding 996 to get something noteworthy and impressive on thier cv so they could get another good job and quit whatever it was they had to pick up to pay the bills in the mean time…
  
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- chonglibloodsport@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  A lot of FOSS development isn’t rich developers donating their free time, it’s paid developers who were hired by their company to work on an open source project the company deems crucial to their business.
  
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  - masterspace@lemmy.ca ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    Yes, but I would point out that:
    
    a) a bunch of those commercially supported Foss projects still started out as a personal project of one of a small handful of programmers that then got popular and exploded.
    
    b) more importantly yes, a lot of commercially useful FOSS is developed by paid developers working at tech companies as part of their line of work, stuff like browsers, languages, frameworks, packages, etc. but a lot of the most jconic and beloved consumer facing FOSS applications are not as it’s harder to monetize at that point since you’re not building on top of those projects.
    
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    pelya@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    Tech companies spend effort on a FOSS project when either it’s their main product, or when they have no choice, it’s licensed under GPL and there are no BSD or Apache-licensed alternatives. Contributions are usually done by individual employees in their after-hours time, and most managers see it as directly benefitting their competition.
    
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- idunnololz@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  Yeah. Extremely good software engineers can easy demand $200/hour as a contracto and that’s still considered lowr. They are essentially doing that much worth of work for free.
  
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sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
Yup. I did a fair amount of FOSS in school to build a resume, then I started a career, got married, and had kids, so now I don’t do much. I plan to do more when the kids get older, but I currently have other priorities.

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- AA5B@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  It can be really hard to get that motivation back. I said the same thing way back. However now I’m a a solid career point, my kids are in college, and I’m divorced. I have to reinvent my life according to only my priorities. This is my opportunity. Yet I’m doom scrolling. Time flies with useless crap and the motivation to create is not as strong
  
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  - sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    I feel that. I spend a lot of time doing stuff for myself (playing games, watching videos, and some doom scrolling), but I keep telling myself it’s because it’s inconsistent in frequency and duration.
    
    But at the end of the day, it’s largely an excuse. I contributed to Lemmy a bit when I switched, and I could totally find a few hours a week to help with something. I just don’t, because it’s always a tradeoff with other things I’d like to do, some of them also productive.
    
    So I guess we’ll see what I do. In the next 5 years, my kids will be transitioning to being more independent, and I’ll have more and more time available. My current plan is to get more involved in FOSS, but we’ll see if I actually do
    
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