Why are there so many graybeards in FOSS?
Why are there so many graybeards in FOSS?
The hurdles are higher than you might imagine
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.
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.
Yeah. Extremely good software engineers can easy demand $200/hour as a contractor and that's still considered low. They are essentially doing that much worth of work for free.
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.
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...
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.
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
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.
It didn’t start grey but then I read the issues tracker.
Because the replacement comes from non-graybeards in FOSS, and their replacement from without-beards in FOSS, and they come from youths in FOSS, and they from teens geeking around with computers, and oops - teens are not geeking around with computers, they are watching reels and scrolling recommendations and doing other bullshit. If they have a PC, it's an unloved work tool for them, with crappy bloated Windows, crappy bloated software for work and studies, not always crappy, but bloated games, you get the idea.
Because there was a generation very fertile on geeks. It's going away. There are demographic pits and there are demographic, what they call them, hills? The point is, we are seeing the effects of the latter.
and they from teens geeking around with computers, and oops - teens are not geeking around with computers, they are watching reels and scrolling recommendations and doing other bullshit.
"Youth bad." Lazy take. As if everyone in the gray beard generation was tinkering around with computers? Plenty of youths still tinker. Posting condescending shit like this is just going to turn them off from pursuing/contributing.
It's not youth bad. It's that in the 80s and 90s, computers were fun and required a lot of tinkering. Nowadays they mostly work. They're boring.
People who tinkered learned stuff. Users just know how to use a couple applications.
I don't see anything that could be considered a "Youth bad" statement in that comment. It's a complex issue, influenced by a myriad of factors.
For example, I could dissasemle and reassemble my first PC without any prior knowledge. I had to learn to use DOS to navigate the OS and get things done. I got a book from the library about it, and spent hours upon hours just learning about how the file structure, commands, programs, external media, etc. worked before I could do anything remotely useful.
Today a PC/tablet/phone is a black box, you have to actively WANT to tinker in order to learn such about how they work. And most big tech companies try to punish you for so much as trying to replace a battery yourself.
I suspect you are projecting some personal feelings onto a stranger's comment.
Gen Z/Alpha are the new boomers. I teach hundreds of so called intellectual cream of the crop per year. It was bad before the pandemic, it's seriously concerning now. The youth has largely divorced from reasoning and are used to reason in simple inputs to simple output. I am genuinely scared.
No, it's recognizing that tinkering means different things now.
In the 80s and 90s, if you were learning computers you had no choice but to understand how the physical machine worked and how software interacted with it. Understanding the operating system, and scripting was required for essentially any task that wasn't in the narrow collection of tasks where there was commercial software. There was essentially one path (or a bunch of paths that were closely related to each other) for people interested in computers.
That just isn't the case now. There are more options available and many (most?) of them are built on top of software that abstracts away the underlying complexity. Now, a person can use technology and never need to understand how it works. Smartphones are an excellent example of this. People learn to use iOS or Android without ever knowing how it works, they deal with the abstractions instead of the underlying bits that were used to create it.
For example, If you want to play games, you press a button in Steam and it installs. If you want to stream your gaming session to millions of people, you install OBS and enter your Twitch credentials. You don't need to understand graphical pipelines, codecs, networking, load balancing, or worry about creating client-side applications for your users. Everything is already created for you.
There are more options available in technology and it is completely expected that people distribute themselves amongst those options.
Sure, sure, old man. Everything was better when you were young.
There never was a majority of people who were into computers. It was always a minority. And I'd argue that nowadays there's more developers because there's simply more people with access to computers.
Some of them won't like them, some will be neutral and some will be "geeking around".
And having seen some code from people both older and younger, the younger ones are better (note that it's my anecdotal evidence). And you at least can train the younger ones, while the "experienced" will argue with you and take energy out of your day.
I'm so tired of the stupid "when I was young, everything was better". You know what else was exactly the same? The previous generation telling you how everything was better when they were young. Congrats, you're them now.
Sure, sure, old man. Everything was better when you were young.
I'm 28.
There never was a majority of people who were into computers. It was always a minority. And I’d argue that nowadays there’s more developers because there’s simply more people with access to computers.
I've literally said that the kind of access to computers matters. In my childhood it was Windows 2000 (98SE when I wasn't intelligent or interested enough). In those greybeards' childhoods - I guess a greybeard is someone who didn't have a computer in their childhood, but with programmable calculators, or automatic devices (like sewing machines) manufactured then, it was easier to grasp the initial concepts.
Human brain is not a condom, it can't just fit something as messy and big even to use as today's desktop OS'es and general approaches and the Web. It will reject it and find other occupations. While in year 2005 the Web was more or less understandable, and desktop operating systems at least in UI\UX didn't complicate matters too much.
Some of them won’t like them, some will be neutral and some will be “geeking around”.
But the proportion will change in just the way I've described.
And having seen some code from people both older and younger, the younger ones are better (note that it’s my anecdotal evidence). And you at least can train the younger ones, while the “experienced” will argue with you and take energy out of your day.
Maybe that's because you are wrong and like people who bend under the pressure of your ignorance. Hypothetically, this is not an attack. Or maybe just those who don't argue, that's a social thing.
Also, of course, people whose experience has been formed in a different environment think differently, and their solutions might seem worse for someone preferring the current environment.
As you said, that's anecdotal.
I’m so tired of the stupid “when I was young, everything was better”. You know what else was exactly the same? The previous generation telling you how everything was better when they were young. Congrats, you’re them now.
Well, this would mean you're tired of your own mental masturbation because this is not what I said.
I'm talking more along the lines of everything coming to an end and this complexity growth being one of the mechanisms through which this industry will eventually crash. Analogous to, say, citizenship through service for Roman empire.
Normal, mainstream software expected users to run DOS commands and edit autoexec.bat/config.sys files, and installing new hardware often involved configuring motherboard DIP switches and trying to figure out what "IRQ" and "DMA" means. There is no equivalent to that today. Plug it in, turn it on, and you're done. 9 times out of 10 you don't even need to install a driver, your OS already has it. Where does the door to learning and discovery present itself? With plug and play systems and walled garden app stores, everywhere a user could possibly come across some more advanced concepts has been muted and decorated over with pretty conveniences. Computers are toasters now.
I think it's more a matter of the ideals of the times, Foss was created in the 80's, as I see it as an ideological child of the 70's, a period of time where progress, optimism and idealism about creating a better future and a better world probably peaked.
Of course there is also idealism today, but it's different, at least the way I see it, the sense of quick progress especially on the humanitarian side is gone, the decades of peace with Russia is broken, and climate change hangs as a threatening cloud above us, and the rise of China creates turbulence in the world order.
So although things maybe weren't actually better in the 80's, there are definitely aspects that look very attractive in hindsight.But as I see it, the mentality for FOSS is now stronger than ever, because aside from idealism, it's proved itself to also be a pragmatically good choice in many situations. But all the original founders and enablers are of course old today.
And complaining about how "people today" use technology is stupid, because chances are we would have done the same had it been available to us when we were young.
Lol yeah that was some anecdotal evidence!
What's next, girls vs boys code? People wearing hats vs people not wearing hats code?
Manager material right there.
BTW if an old geek argues that your code design/decision is bad then you should probably listen. But that's what beginners don't do, they think they know it all...
That's a looooot of assumptions and stale assumptions at that.
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?
One rather obvious reason is that society has a lot of greybeards in general. The baby boomer generation was named that for a reason, and people have been living longer on average. Lots of countries are struggling with the demographic effects. There's no reason to expect that tech or something even more specific like FOSS would be exempt.
Another aspect here is that FOSS is still kind of new in society. There's just more people who have had the chance to age into FOSS greybeards than when those greybeards were young. (And they were thus likely to a lesser degree blocked by entrenched greybeards when they were getting started.)
People born in the 50s have long retired. The grey beards are not baby-boomers. They are people born in the late 60s and 70s. They are people who grew up as computing technology matured. They started coding low level and had careers building the infrastructure of computing which is what a lot of FOSS is.
However the question is not why these people have aged? It's why hasn't there been a steady stream of people taking their place from younger generations?
I believe it's because the generations after them have careers working at higher levels of abstraction. Often going lower level is seen as black magic that is unknown to them.
There may be some truth to that, but seeing Rust take off means there's still interest in lower level languages. Rust is making its way to the Linux kernel and other established FOSS projects, which improves the chances for people uncomfortable with C-style languages to get involved.
But I think the explanation is simpler: younger people don't have the time for FOSS, and few companies pay people to work on FOSS. So these graybeards are either grandfathered into the few roles that exist, or have sufficient time (e.g. kids moved out/largely independent).
I've noticed that a lot in newer users.
Even in technical fields, the users know how to use the software but they don't understand anything under that. A lot of people got into computer via smartphones where you are essentially locked out of anything below the application layer.
Yes the capitalist miracle ensures that people who want children can't afford them or even if they ca, they don't have time for them.
Why would these removed be mothers when they could be making daddy some mother fucking money?!
I would think it's a good thing that there are a lot of greybeards in FOSS? If the claim is true, then it should mean that once you get into FOSS you tend to stay there.
The article seems to be referring to FOSS code contribution more than user adoption, but the same idea holds. The more I learn about my distro and its packages, the less scared I get about something going wrong that I can't fix and the less likely it is I will go back into an OS riddled with ads and spyware.
For code contribution I only ever managed to do a PR for a Kodi plugin, and even then it was only because this amazing guy from their team walked me through the whole thing step by step. It was quite intimidating figuring out how to do that stuff for the first time.
It’s good in some ways, but I read one of the points as a generational turnover. Graybeards are the people who invented a lot of foss and stayed true to the calling. True heroes. But there needs to be a continuation, fresh blood, a bright future, and the graybeards won’t be around forever.
Graybeards are also people who got into foss when it was easy to start. The fear is there are higher expectations now, higher complexity, creating barriers to entry for the next generation
I can't speak to the rest but I started working on Linux and other FOSS in ~1995 as a young man and just never stopped. The same applies to many others I know. We started young and are still here.
Most old FOSS is written and maintained in programming languages that Kids these days™ don't think are cool (and were probably never taught about in school either).
Hardware used to come with an extensive manual. Hardware these days is a vendor-locked black-box with built-in obsolescence that might get you in court if you open it.
Kids were more curious and spent more time outside, Kids these days™ spend most of their time under the light of screens, inside their safe spaces and can't even tie their shoelaces.
Nah, the kids I know learned C just fine. C is simple, C is all you need for writing kernel drivers, pointers are not that hard if you explain them well, it just feels really pedestrian compared to Python or Typescript.
Greybeards, like in Skyrim you mean?
FOSS RO DAH
Extra Upvote ⬆️
Hence the power of the shout "sudo rm -rf*"!
I, USE ARCH (btw)
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.
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.
Nowadays it's mostly college kids trying to add something to their resume. And it's all note taking apps
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.
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
The problem the article highlights is not the considerable amount of "graybeards," but the lack of everyone else.
to have a bigger part of that pie, then have more of them jump in.
The problem is: how?
I personally enjoy working with open source projects because I like making code to help other people. But, apparently, that's not enough of an incentive for other people.
Or, of course, they don't have the time/resources
And what is the problem with that?
You don’t think that’s a problem that most essential open source software is maintained by older people who will retire sooner than later?
Retirement and open source contribution sounds like an excellent combination to me. Give the old men something to do, let the projects be worked on by people who can take their time, make the best use of the expertise. All that sounds great.
Because older men tend to be more financially secure and hence have more time for generosity.
So a lot of people have pointed out the obvious factors like experience, time, and money. But I think a another big one is the culture. A lot of FOSS has been impenetrable ime with how many keyboard warriors exist in discord and forum communities. Doesn't exactly make the newbie experience the best
Greybeards can be found in lots of places, but definitely not on discord.
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.
Silicon Valley and the social Darwinist tech bro culture is a very “there but for the grace of God go I” situation for me.
Raised in a white conservative family & area, was an angry and edgy teenager that kept getting great grades, understood that being a “good” person meant building wealth, and bad life experiences were personal responsibility issues, etc. Went to a high end university. And even in my early adult years, I liked to listen to talk on my commute more than music, and it was pre-smartphone so I didn’t have my Howard Stern mp3s and therefore everything I listened to on the radio was Republican bad faith propaganda during the W era in the US.
But not to fear. The same inquisitive nature that got me into computers/STEM and out of religion as a minor, also helped me straighten out the meaning of life as an adult. In middle age I’m into the ole triple L: Lemmy, Leftism, and Linux, lol. My software engineering job is at a very much non-silicon-valley place that’s only 3 miles from my modest house via quiet twisty country road, and instead of a Lambo I have a family, a koi pond, and a ton of other pets. I was always into nature and wildlife (especially aquatic) as a kid and it never went away.