Comment by dartos

Comment by dartos 2 months ago

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.

mike_hearn 2 months ago

I was being pretty generous with my timespans. 30 years ago was 1994. Personal computers had existed for quite a long time by then. The Apple Mac launched in 1984.

Open source did exist in 1994: projects like Linux and Python were started around 1991 but nearly nobody knew about them or used them. The average person or developer in 1994 had zero encounters with open source software. Even by 2000 this was still the case: the average developer was working with Visual Basic or Delphi or Visual Studio (all proprietary) using the Windows API or VBX/OCX controls as libraries (proprietary), connecting to Oracle, SQL Server or Access for data (proprietary) and if they were bold, rendering web UIs from IIS or Netscape's servers (proprietary) to Internet Explorer or Netscape Communicator (all proprietary). If they were cutting edge like Google they might be using Linux as a server kernel, but that was rare and a source of competitive advantage. Google wrote all of its own internal libraries starting from the STL upwards partly because there just weren't that many to adopt if you worked on Linux.

> It’s just hard to find learning resources on reverse engineering hardware, since that isn’t the entry point for programmers anymore.

Well, two books is a lot. Back in the day there were none :) I think this shows the issue, right? Yes there are more developers overall, but there are also more opportunities and things to do. Why would you spend hours slaving over a buggy wifi driver when you could try your hand at writing a mobile app instead, which might make you rich? Back in the 90s this was far less of an option for most developers. The original motivation was a desire to use something other than Windows on PC class hardware, but that desire has been satiated by Apple for a long time and desktop Linux remains obscure.

I've experienced all of this. My first open source project was on Windows, back when open source was novel and new. Then I worked on Linux for a while - I had code in Wine and GNOME and a few other things. Then I wrote open source libraries and took part in Bitcoin. These days I do open source work for pay and also sell a proprietary developer tool. So, seen it from every angle. My gut feeling is that we're going to see a resurgence of proprietary platforms and libraries in the coming years.

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dartos 2 months ago

> Why would you spend hours slaving over a buggy wifi driver when you could try your hand at writing a mobile app instead, which might make you rich?
People do get paid to write Linux WiFi drivers. Especially for embedded devices. But honestly, some people just like that stuff. I’ve watched a twitch stream where a hobbyist reverse engineered the wireless protocol that the valve knuckles controller used.
He spent hours sifting through bits in wireshark.
Some people see a problem and bash their heads against it until it’s fixed. Torvalds is one of those people and I’m sure many open source contributors are too.
Kind of an aside, but what was really cool was that the creator of that protocol was in chat dropping hints.
IMO the big failing of the open source community is selling out too much and not attracting as many enthusiasts as career programmers (not that there isn’t overlap)
Alan Perlis has a quote that goes like “I hope we keep the fun in computing” and I think we failed at that.
My outlook isn’t as bleak. I think Linux is here to stay. I don’t really see a proprietary OS that is as robust and runs on as many different platforms taking Linux’s thunder.
Mobile and VR has android.
Even on desktop, the seam deck is pushing it forward, though it will forever probably remain niche on desktop.

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- mike_hearn 2 months ago
  
  Sure, but the only reason Linux wifi drivers are open source is that Linux was born at the start of the GNU movement and Linus picked the GPL. If he had picked a BSD license, or LGPL for drivers, then people would still get paid to write them but they wouldn't be open source. What you see nowadays is that the GPL is long since abandoned, I don't remember the last time I encountered an open source project that was GPL outside of the few big ones that survive from the 90s.
  With respect to maintainers getting old, I guess your example is kind of on point. It used to be driven by ideology or the practical desire for a home UNIX. That motivated people to spend the long evenings alone working it out. Now it's driven by building a Twitch audience, and the hobbyist was even getting help!
  I guess with respect to stealing Linux's thunder, I feel like that happened 20 years ago already. When MacOS X came out there was a long stream of people 'defecting' to it from the Linux community. It separated those who just wanted UNIX from those who had the ideology and a lot of the energy dissipated from Linux at that time.
  
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