Will young developers take on key open source software?
bbc.com
bbc.com
They have not lived through the days that pirated software was common, as most folks would not have income to pay for every single piece of software on their computers.
They have grown up with disposable computing devices, where OEMs have gone back to pre-PC revolution, where to get an OS upgrade one would get a new computer, and all peripherals were external, USB ports replacing parallel ports, as means to get those margins pre-clone wars back, using software with microtransactions.
Additionally people have realised that FOOS without income doesn't scale, and we're back to Shareware by another name, with incentives to turn them into VC sponsored unicorns, something that we didn't have back in the day, getting some money to get by was already good enough.
After my generation is gone, so are all FOSS founders, and like every movent in human history, it will be replaced by something else.
That's basically a kind way of saying that they mock the crazy old guy who shakes his fists at the cloud, and mumbles something about Microsoft and Google.
While I know that's how things simply are, I imagine in current climate it'd put off a lot of people away from anything that resembles volunteering. "If you're good at something, never do it for free."
So we were unpaid labor.
Boomers pulled up the ladder and now they're wondering why noone is climbing up.
But I suppose it depends on what sort or magnitude of impact you want to make on the scene.
Its an unpopular view but most of FOSS getting to the point of adoption that its at today was largely a reaction to monopolies, barriers of entry, and bad software alternatives whose cost was price gouging.
Build an OSS software suite as a company, solicit free labor, get bought out, take it private and reap the reward of money printing.
Knowing this cycle is a reality, as opposed to just someone saying it can theoretically happen, who would ever contribute when they aren't paid?
There are plenty of competent and skilled people today who are out of work, and can't feed themselves without government assistance.
No, but you can make a video player like MPlayer, a video library like ffmpeg, an image viewer like xv (not technically open source but close), a widget library like GTK1, an operating system, and so on and so forth. There is a lot of useful software which started as a one man show.
I need to make sure I can pay off my debt before having a clear mind to focus on being a part of an effort bigger than myself.
I'm actually curious, I've only seen the numbers in aggregate.
The poor reading comprehension is the purposeful product of decades of indoctrination, torture, and selective interference to breed out and reduce intelligence.