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I think a major problem is the abundance of entertainment in modern times. Rather than hacking out of curiosity and for fun, there are so many substitutes like

by _lvbh 2y ago

I think a major problem is the abundance of entertainment in modern times. Rather than hacking out of curiosity and for fun, there are so many substitutes like games and social media that a high number of young developers simply don’t feel bored enough to do anything. There are obviously still some pretty prominent young open source devs but they’re quite rare. I find today’s identity politics in FOSS also slightly problematic but that’s too controversial of a topic to delve into.

coldpie 2y ago
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.
ThrowawayR2 2y ago
Entertainment was abundant in the '80s and '90s too, including games and in-person socialization.
JohnFen 2y ago
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.
justinclift 2y ago
> 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. :(

by _lvbh 2y ago

coldpie 2y ago

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.

ThrowawayR2 2y ago

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

JohnFen 2y ago

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.

justinclift 2y ago

> 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. :(