Technology

Why do young people pop into a community that has been around for decades and wonder why the old people who built it are still around?

Because people who have been around in FOSS since the 70s and 80s are the most dedicated toward it and tend to fund it more.

Because older men tend to be more financially secure and hence have more time for generosity.

When I got into the business in the late 1970s, there was strong selective pressure in favor of people being capable and smart. Back then, software didn't offer a lucrative career path for people with good memories, conformist instincts and a superficial command of MBA jargon. The people who had coding jobs and who didn't wash out had it in their blood. There were lots of bullshitters, just as there are now, but they failed rapidly and were driven out.

I'm a bit younger than the OG greybeards (and a lot younger than people like Don Knuth). I've been in the business for longer than most coders have been alive. During that time, I've reskilled more times than I can count, and I still write code, though it's mainly prototype and proof-of-concept stuff at this stage in my career, when the development team gets stuck.

And that's the thing: I'm not there to block new people from submitting pull requests. I'm there to help get the job done. If you find the whole process opaque and need mentoring, just ask.

At lot of this strikes me as non-issues, or even bordering on entitlement.

Well, for instance, if you're contributing your own code, there is a high bar to clear. It often feels as if you need to surpass whatever the existing functionality is. Just to get accepted, you have to offer something better than some existing product that may have been around for decades.

Well, no kidding, that's how it works in most things. Why would a project accept a contribution that doesn't add a previously missing feature or improve on the implementation of a current one? I would be pretty suspect of using a program that accepts a random commit so that a college kid can check the "Timmy's first accepted pull request" box and let them pad their resume.

Some would-be contributors are very familiar with programming, reading, and writing code, but they may never have opened an issue or sent a pull request. This is a scary first step. Others may have the necessary tech skills, but not the creativity. Where should they you begin? Also, if someone is scared, that can result in impostor syndrome. The fear that people all over the world will see your bad code is a powerful factor reducing the urge to share it.

These are all things that the greybeards being maligned had to figure out at some point, I don't really see the harm in new contributors being expected to do the same, especially when there is an abundance of documentation and tutorials available now, which simply didn't exist in the past.

For instance, there are a lot of folks doing mods for video games. This can be a very creative activity, there is lots of room for innovation, as well as outlets such as streaming to reach an audience. It applies to all sorts of games, such as Pokémon, Elder Scrolls, and Minecraft. Game modding is a great way in. It could even be a way to set up a company, or to make a living. But it's not considered as FOSS. For novices getting interested, it could even be attracting people away from getting into FOSS development.

Again, nothing new here. No, game mods weren't nearly as prevalent in the past, but new devs have had the choice between contributing to FOSS software and contributing to/creating proprietary programs for as long as FOSS has been a thing.

I don't think the old guard should be dismissive or rude to newcomers when their contributions aren't up to the standard expected to be accepted, but they also aren't getting paid to be these peoples' mentors. It kind of reminds me of posts I see in language learning communities, where people would get all upset, "I completed the Duolingo Spanish tree, but the cashiers at my local Mexican restaurant speak too fast for me to understand and they switch to English when I try to talk to them in Spanish." Cool that you want to try and use the language, my friend, but these people aren't being paid to be your tutor, and you may well be making their job more difficult and/or holding up other paying customers by trying to force random people to listen to your extremely basic, and likely incorrect, Spanish. They don't have an obligation to put everything else in their work or life on hold to try and stroke your ego.

Curiously, I don't see any mention of what, in my view, is likely a much more serious issue to getting new generations of contributors involved, as well as having a more diverse set of contributors. Access to technology and relevant education is far from uniform. If little Timmy from Greenwich, CT has had a personal computer he was free to mess around with to his heart's content from the moment he could read and attended a well-funded school with the possibility of studying computers, programming, and early exposure to things like Linux from grade school onwards, it shouldn't come as any surprise that he's more comfortable working with these concepts and more likely to wind up contributing successfully to FOSS projects than my friend Lucas, in Brazil, who only got a second-hand computer when he managed to get accepted to university, and had no real concept of Linux/FOSS until I explained to him why I couldn't just install a random, Windows-only program he thought would be useful to me.

To draw another language learning comparison, it's like how in the US, most students will only study a second language for a couple of years in high school and two semesters at university, if they attend higher education, and then you periodically have people going, "How come so many Americans fail to speak a second language compared to students in Europe?" Then, you look at the curriculum in countries like Germany, and realize they begin teaching students English as early as grade-school, often adding another foreign language later on. Is it any surprise that, when they have nearly a decade of foreign language instruction, compared to the mere two years many Americans get, alongside a fair bit more exposure to and encouragement of engaging with foreign language media, that they wind up being more proficient at using said language on average?

It's hardly a perfect solution that will completely mitigate all of the issues with getting younger and more diverse groups of people to contribute to FOSS projects, but I don't doubt that having access to computers in the home from a young age and access to more extensive education on computers and related fields from a much younger age would go a long way towards getting more people involved. Of course, even then, having the downtime to be able to dedicate to contributing to/maintaining FOSS projects is a factor that will disproportionately favor historically privileged groups. Even if she has the knowledge and ability to do so, a single mother working three jobs in the Bronx in order to keep a roof over her family's head, food on the table, and the lights and heating on simply might choose not to spend what little free time she has writing a badass new MPD client in Rust that has plugins to integrate with Lidarr and automatically fix metadata with beets based on matching the hashes of files to releases on various trackers in order to scrape the release data from them, no matter how cool the concept might sound to her. And it's not really something I could blame her for.

The current tech industry has taken a hard right turn. While there are of course many standout foss contributors and many come up every day, the vast majority of people in tech have no qualms about waking up, destroying privacy at Facebook, and having a beer after work with friends and ignoring society. Silicon valley is "fuck you got mine" on an industrial scale.

And what is the problem with that?

I mean, it sounds as if that is a bad thing that people are dedicating their free time at the betterment of something that can be used freely by everyone, including you

If you want others (different color, sex, gender, race, abilities, sexual preferences) to have a bigger part of that pie, then have more of them jump in.

I am guessing that most of the greybeards are here doing this because they can, abs like it. Help others to he able to help out

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.

It didn’t start grey but then I read the issues tracker.