Blood for the blood god?
I might have missed if it was in the article. Sorry in advance for that.
Do we have any idea regarding the top 3 or top 5 reasons that drove potential contributors away? Not in terms of hypotheses, asking about actual studies, interviews, surveys, etc
The sad thing is that the last few years was the PERFECT time for open source to see a youth resurgence.
Almost two years ago we saw widespread layoffs across the tech industry, and tens of thousands of young people found themselves without work for long periods of time. Many of them would have killed for an opportunity to spend that time “working” for major open source projects with a small stipend for services provided. Young people can say “I was laid off at Viacom, but worked for the Linux Foundation for 6 months before finding my next role at …”
Hell, you want some hungry talent that would love to work on open source? Target those that are laid off or PIP’d while on visas, and put some legal resources behind supporting their stay in the country while they work on open source, until they find their feet again. Most of them will either go back home or will end up working at predatory consultancy firms that hire L1 or H1 workers that need to stay for their families sake, so take that conveyor belt of talent and put them to work on something useful.
I figure business makes quite enough money off my efforts during the day without me also generating value for them for free in the evening.
Young people today are struggling to make ends meet - they don’t have enough comfort and free time to be able to donate their labor.
I wish I had one manday a week to contribute to the libraries my company uses. I usually do it in my work hours when I find a serious bug or need a new feature.
I fixed a bug in an open source project we use and got into trouble for it :|
That’s like saying they don’t have enough comfort and free time to do art. Actually, the statements are identical. We create not because we can but because we must.
Oh man you’re so close to getting the point…
We don’t have enough comfort and free time to do art! That’s an actual legitimate thing that’s going on right now
Every artist sacrifices other things so that they can do art. I get that we have less to sacrifice than we used to but in objective, absolute, historical terms, we are still sooooo fucking wealthy and have so many opportunities and resources at our disposal. And I say this as someone with a 13k annual income who contributes to FOSS projects.
God it’s not even that, the general tech knowledge has just plowed into the ground
That’s true, but that’s also just the general populous, who weren’t ever contributing to open source anyways.
I don’t think the quality of coders (professional or hobby) has really declined that much.
oh it definitely has. I’ve been in the industry since last century, the actual poke everything, do this for fun, invest yourself, wild jockey type…well we’re a dying breed.
