Graying open source community needs fresh blood

Only the first is the correct free software way.

The second is misguided and leads to sob stories of burnout. It's also an open invitation for idiots and corporations to walk all over you. And then you accept Jia's offer to be co-maintainer because it's getting to be too much for you. And then you have your software backdoored, ironically burning the demanding leeches that thought they could get a free lunch off of you.

That's really weird. Do those contracts mean that you are prohibited from contributing in your role in the company, or prohibited in your private life?

I've found the former to be reasonably common (and I don't object to that).

I've not encountered the latter at all, but then I also always make sure to negotiate away all the clauses that give my employer any claim over work I do on my own time with my own resources, or the ability to prohibit me from engaging in development on my own.

(1) Is a problem for sure. Proprietary devs always overestimate the value of their code, and lack of open source scrutiny typically makes code quality worse.

(2) Definitely.

(3) VC culture can be an issue, though Facebook might not be the best example (they gave us React, GraphQL, PyTorch, and more).

I would add (4) (Related to your 2)

OSS projects are probably getting bigger on average. Corporate-sponsored projects that tackle complex problems, as with a lot of current data science and AI, means that one-man projects are almost impossible to get off the ground. One-man projects have to be very lucky - get the right idea, the right time, and by a person who can do it (capability, time, personality)

I concur, I've been 'around' the OSS community even before I had skills to be able to give back to it and something after 2010 shifted and it felt like open-source was a way for corporations to exploit free labour of ideologues they could sell a daydream to. The promise of fame or getting hired, etc drove some young people who bought the lie to give up everything. I even knew a guy who only stopped when he was homeless and spending all his time on library computers trying to respond to people.

Open source is a gift given by whoever wants, and it's amazing to be in a place in life when you can give if you want to, but it's all 'bonus'.

This feels like an "old man yells at cloud" take :) Certainly when I was young, I learned programming through recreating video games I liked, and sure enough, tons of young people are working on super impressive, open source projects related to video games. Take a look at the video game reverse-engineering projects, or emulators like Dolphin. There are way more young, open source developers now than ever in history. The default for this entire community is open source software. As they grow into their careers, it's going to feel very weird for them to encounter closed tooling.

Entertainment was abundant in the '80s and '90s too, including games and in-person socialization.

I'm not so sure about the availability of entertainment being a significant issue. The sorts of people who are likely to develop on their own are also the sorts of people who consider it entertaining. I know that personally, I've never played a video game or watched a movie that was more entertaining than wrestling with an interesting dev challenge, anyway.

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

Yeah. It looks like various OSS projects are being mobbed / targeted in some kind of co-ordinated fashion, which doesn't bode well. :(

"Open source software leads to proprietary Orwellian tech" is quite the take

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

Too true. And a lot of the chatter I hear about benefiting the user seems like regurgitated marketing copy and euphemism, with AFAICT no awareness of what really developing for the user would be like.

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

Yes, and I have a guess of where the potential likely is (with a little background)...

I wonder whether this is actually harder to appeal to the amenable people than it used to be, because they're surrounded by ubiquitous conflicting messages -- about what computers, software, development, collaboration, design (UX for engagement and manipulation), charity (it's for college applications), etc. are about. And when even the basic tools with which you can build new things are getting twisted, with anti-social intent implicit in their design.

Remember when programmers were nerds -- in the sense of some degree of social outcast, and when looking at the equivalent of a smartphone in public risked getting you physically beaten up, and certainly ridiculed?

Not the "nerd" that currently means having the latest gadgets for posturing on social media, and being on track for a big-money career that upper-middle families launch their kids into, and which is blessed as fashionable by the cool kids at school?

Maybe the next contributors in the earlier spirit still have to come from people who have an outside perspective, and now who are also strong-minded enough to cut through the deafening noise of commercial greed messages.

Right? I'm not interested in working for tech billionaires for free.

How many posts here on HN are from people that someone forked their project and are now selling it? I always check out the license - oh, MIT or BSD. You opened yourself to that.

This is a huge part of why I stopped engaging with the OSS community myself.

Have you tried picking a project that might have a lower bar for contributing, or is closer to your skills? Of course, this doesn’t help those projects be more accessible, but it could help develop your confidence until you’re ready to work on those (and hopefully change their culture!)

And yet you apparently have learned to walk, despite the ground meeting you quite rudely here and there. Apply the same here.

True, assholes do exist. If they didn't, the modern human world likely wouldn't be a shithole, but yet here we are. But as you demand people to extend their goodwill and charitable assumptions to you, take a moment to do the same to them. It might very well be that your contribution is taking the project in a direction they don't want to pursue. It might be that what you are contributing is the failed idea #420 from a year ago. It might be that what you are contributing is what has caused bug #666 which took many months to debug and fix. It might be more often than not that you blatantly fail to do as Romans do when in Rome.

Maybe young people are exactly the same as they were 20 years ago, but it's my perception that thanks to flashy media abound, attention spans are indeed shortening, and demands for instant gratification are bigger now than they used to be. But this is not how you do anything of value. Maybe spend some time reading the room before rushing in and then complaining about rude comments.

> It feels like ... any contribution I might submit will get smacked down in PR for some arcane technical reason, likely with a rude comment

Why do you feel this way? FWIW that has not been my experience at all.

That kind of sounds like the OSS projects you've interacted with haven't had friendly people running them.

Maybe that's the key thing? "Look for OSS projects with friendly people" or similar? :)

Granted, pipenv was a dumpster fire and PyPA did make a bunch of bumbling fools of themselves by jumping on it and calling it the tool to manage dependencies.

That girl isn't a greybeard. That's a nobeard. No one takes them seriously.

Well there’s always the advantage that you can feel good about making something better while improving your skills.

>in defiance of market laws

My understanding of the economics of software is that open source software is inevitable. The marginal cost of producing and distributing software is zero, and so the only real way to make money is to sell access to physical resources as a service and give the software away for free.

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

The advantage is the software I use gets better. OSS works fine with purely selfish motives: implement the fixes & features you want for your needs, contribute them upstream so you don't have to maintain a diff.

write documentation, help out new people on forums, translation, demo at tech events, organise said tech events to evangelise.