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> I’m not sure exactly how it happened. I think the lazy answer is “GitHub!!!!”. I do think GitHub played a role, but I think the answer is more complex than th

> I’m not sure exactly how it happened. I think the lazy answer is “GitHub!!!!”. I do think GitHub played a role, but I think the answer is more complex than that. I personally think that gender plays a huge role. But that’s a different essay. Regardless of why it happened, something did happen. "GitHub!!!!" may be a lazy answer, but why isn't "gender!!!!" an equally lazy answer?

steveklabnik 8y ago
1. Gender is an extremely complex topic, "github made more devs" is not. 2. I didn't say that "gender!!!" was an answer; I said that the answer is complex, and that things like gender play one role in it. 3. I didn't give any answer here, explicitly, so it cannot be a lazy answer.
bitwize 8y ago
I think an even better lazy answer is "millennials!!!" Or rather, people who got into programming after The Cathedral and the Bazaar proved phenomenally successful at its job. Back in the 90s, free and open source software was obscure. The ideology really only appealed to people who were inclined to get into programming, and then only to a small subset of technolibertarians who valued the potential riches copyright could bestow less than they were irritated by the hindrance it presented to writing more cool software, or even to using a computer without frustration and risk. To such people, preserving and contributing to the canon of free software became an important cultural mission very closely tied with the concept of human freedom itself: if anyone with a computer is to be truly free of the predations of governments and corporations, they must be running free software, and inasmuch as people still can't do that for 100% of their uses for a computer, that's an open problem to be solved. These people are likely to be very conscientious (being programmer types) and to have actually read the GNU Manifesto, CatB, and related documents. These days, Raymond's message of "open source is good for business" is so accepted in the tech world that it's the first form of this ideology many (if not most) open source devs are exposed to. A lot of that has to do with the first, second, and third dot-com booms that open source helped to kick off, which vastly expanded the pool of developers and developer wannabes with the promise of startup-founder riches. The composition of people involved with open source has changed from "mainly hackers" to something including many more business types, who are far more "practical" in that they are concerned with the following quarter's bottom line (or their own paycheck) much more than any ideology. So they understand that open source is good for business, but do not comprehend the relationship of free software to individual freedom and society as a whole. They are concerned with what's good for business. And if closing the source partway or all the way delivers higher projected revenues over the next fiscal quarter or year, so be it. That's a sacrifice they're willing to make. It's unfortunate that we haven't communicated our values to the wider community nearly as effectively as Stallman or Raymond might have hoped. Comfort can be taken, I suppose, that we are still better off than we were in 1995, when software development was 99% proprietarywith expectation of payment, and giving your software away meant you were either some sort of communist, or didn't value what you wrote too much.

steveklabnik 8y ago

1. Gender is an extremely complex topic, "github made more devs" is not. 2. I didn't say that "gender!!!" was an answer; I said that the answer is complex, and that things like gender play one role in it. 3. I didn't give any answer here, explicitly, so it cannot be a lazy answer.

bitwize 8y ago

I think an even better lazy answer is "millennials!!!" Or rather, people who got into programming after The Cathedral and the Bazaar proved phenomenally successful at its job. Back in the 90s, free and open source software was obscure. The ideology really only appealed to people who were inclined to get into programming, and then only to a small subset of technolibertarians who valued the potential riches copyright could bestow less than they were irritated by the hindrance it presented to writing more cool software, or even to using a computer without frustration and risk. To such people, preserving and contributing to the canon of free software became an important cultural mission very closely tied with the concept of human freedom itself: if anyone with a computer is to be truly free of the predations of governments and corporations, they must be running free software, and inasmuch as people still can't do that for 100% of their uses for a computer, that's an open problem to be solved. These people are likely to be very conscientious (being programmer types) and to have actually read the GNU Manifesto, CatB, and related documents. These days, Raymond's message of "open source is good for business" is so accepted in the tech world that it's the first form of this ideology many (if not most) open source devs are exposed to. A lot of that has to do with the first, second, and third dot-com booms that open source helped to kick off, which vastly expanded the pool of developers and developer wannabes with the promise of startup-founder riches. The composition of people involved with open source has changed from "mainly hackers" to something including many more business types, who are far more "practical" in that they are concerned with the following quarter's bottom line (or their own paycheck) much more than any ideology. So they understand that open source is good for business, but do not comprehend the relationship of free software to individual freedom and society as a whole. They are concerned with what's good for business. And if closing the source partway or all the way delivers higher projected revenues over the next fiscal quarter or year, so be it. That's a sacrifice they're willing to make. It's unfortunate that we haven't communicated our values to the wider community nearly as effectively as Stallman or Raymond might have hoped. Comfort can be taken, I suppose, that we are still better off than we were in 1995, when software development was 99% proprietarywith expectation of payment, and giving your software away meant you were either some sort of communist, or didn't value what you wrote too much.