Comment by mike_hearn
Comment by mike_hearn 2 months ago
It hasn't existed for so long! Jeez, kids these days. As a movement it's really only about 30 years old, and that in two separate phases:
1. The GPL/GNU period. The software is mostly called "free software-as-in-freedom". The community is small, volunteer driven, highly ideological and focused primarily on cloning UNIX for commodity PC hardware. Most developers aren't using this stuff at all and work with entirely commercial toolchains.
2. The Apache 2 period. The software is mostly called "open source". The community is huge, frequently driven by corporate donations, not particularly ideological anymore and focused on developer tools / libraries rather than operating systems and desktop apps. Developers now regularly incorporate open source libraries into their commercial programs.
The transition was slow but I'd pick 2008-2010 as the crossing over point. Before that time if someone said they wrote open source software you'd make a weak assumption that they worked somehow on Linux related projects in their evenings/weekends. After that time you'd probably assume they were writing some library and had even odds it was their job.
It's important to remember that 2008+ is ZIRP territory. Money was "free" for investors, so investment piled into a lot of stuff that often wasn't revenue generating because there was nowhere else for it to go. This era was also shaped by a historical aberration - a handful of hyper successful advertising companies whose founders were able to remain in control whilst still selling much of their stock thanks to dual voting classes. Modern developer's understanding of the open source ecosystem, along with their expectation that powerful tools are all free, is very much shaped by the combination of Fed policy and a handful of super rich patron companies that weren't under any pressure to return capital to shareholders.
Thing is none of these factors (ideology, free money, stock with dual voting classes) is historically normal or arguably sustainable over the long run, whereas ordinary capitalism is. So we might well see a reversion to the mean where things like compilers, libraries, operating systems etc become commercial again as relatively high interest rates pull funds out of tech and the supply of Stallmanists devoted to the cause of desktop GNU/Linux continues to dwindle. The recent death of a man who reverse engineered a lot of networking hardware for Linux is an example of this - how many 25 year old hackers want to do that sort of thing any more? They're all writing JS frameworks that only work on AWS these days.
If that does happen though it'll be quite slow. I think the industry would need a kind of Steam for libraries to emerge first, and it's pretty unclear what the next equilibrium phase looks like.
30 years is the majority of the existence of personal computers have been available. It’s a long time
> how many 25 year old hackers want to do that sort of thing?
A lot! More than 30 years ago, that’s for sure. The sheer number of all programmers have increased so much since then.
A few years ago, when I was 25, I was getting into hardware hacking and I found 2 books on the subject.
It’s just hard to find learning resources on reverse engineering hardware, since that isn’t the entry point for programmers anymore.
My hope is that some greybeards will write some resources on how they made harfbuzz or eMacs or whatever.
I’d pay for that knowledge. I’d gladly pay for technical biographies of open source projects.