
Why Linux is not attracting young developers - r11t
http://www.jfplayhouse.com/2010/04/why-linux-is-not-attracting-young.html
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jrockway
The author (and his commenters) have clearly never worked on any open source
project. There is plenty of ego to be had for things like webcam drivers.
Plus, if you have that webcam, it goes from non-working to working, and you
can share that with everyone else in the world. Pretty fun.

Thinking about all the software I use regularly, I know pretty much all the
authors. Some of them I have even met in person, and they have gotten free
beer as a result.

I guess if you are outside the community, it doesn't seem very exciting, but
if you are in the community, it is exciting. Kind of the opposite of high
school cliques...

~~~
kingkilr
Can't agree with you more (except I can't buy people beer in the US...). Open
source is fun! I've made tons of friends through it, participate in a podcast,
and every conference I have awesome people to hang out with.

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fleitz
Linux is not attracting young developers because most young developers don't
have problems that need solving in the kernel.

The amount of change an individual developer can effect on a project is
inversely proportional to the amount of code already written.

~~~
_delirium
The age of a project matters too, I think. If you got into Linux kernel
development in 1995, you had no experience, but not many other people did
either. If you start becoming active in 2010, you're 15 years behind, and
there's no possible way to catch up to someone like Alan Cox or Andrew Morton
in influence.

~~~
rbanffy
You know both will, someday, retire.

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CoreDumpling
It sounds like the author is reacting to the flood of ooh-shiny iPhone app
kiddies that have captured a lot of media attention lately, but I don't think
these are the people who would have been attracted to Linux anyway. And I
don't think it's fair to lump all this together into an amorphous concept of
"Linux" when the problem is a bit more nuanced.

Linux, as a kernel and as a platform, has matured, but there's still plenty of
opportunity for new people to explore new territory. Some of it may be
extending the existing "boring" infrastructure, which the author seems to
blame for turning developers away, but nobody should feel restricted to
working on those things. There's still a lot of exciting application
development to be done, and as an added bonus, if the platform needs
improvements to support your application, you're encouraged to contribute
those as well.

Also, if you want a counterpoint, the Arch Linux developers page certainly
makes me feel old already: <http://www.archlinux.org/developers/>

~~~
vegai
>Also, if you want a counterpoint, the Arch Linux developers page certainly
makes me feel old already: <http://www.archlinux.org/developers/>

Thanks for making me feel young at 30.

~~~
btilly
The same list made me feel old at 40. :-(

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corbet
As the person alleged to having made the initial remark: nobody at the
Collaboration Summit panel said that Linux is not attracting younger
developers. Every three-month cycle gets contributions from over 1000
developers, many of whom are new to the process. Attracting developers is not
the problem.

The thing I was concerned about was the ageing of the core group of subsystem
maintainers - who have been doing the same thing for a long time - and whether
there was room at the upper levels for up-and-coming hackers. A real concern
(though not a huge problem, yet), but a different one.

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rbanffy
Is the iPhone to kernel developer comparison really sensible? It's two very,
very different skill-sets we are talking about.

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manish
I think it is because the learning curve for a kernel is so steep that you
will have to spend a lot of time and energy learning the kernel before you can
do any significant development. It would have been more meaningful if the
author had compared linux attraction to that of any bsd clones. Comparing to
iphone is kind of misleading.

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icefox
At least for KDE it feels like they are on the 3rd or 4th generation of
developers. I am not sure how many of the developers from 10 years ago are
still around.

~~~
wheels
Visible, and amusing example of this: last time I went to FOSDEM, a couple
years back, they tried to sell me a KDE t-shirt at the booth. (For those
outside of the community, icefox and I think both showed up on the KDE radar
about a decade ago.)

Though, with the graph that papachito it got me wondering what "active" means.
I've done 9 commits in the last year (whereas I used to do several hundred)
and suspect I thusly get counted as "active". It might be more interesting to
see things computed as something like people above one standard deviation
below the mean...

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metamemetics
Writing drivers is a less appealing than writing small apps regardless of
platform.

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sliverstorm
I've wanted to get involved sometimes, but I always hear only the best
developers get actual commits, and I know I am not an amazing programmer so I
haven't bothered :(

~~~
jrockway
Your conception is largely false. I can't think of any project I work on
regularly that won't give a commit bit to anyone who asks.

But keep in mind, for best success, the order of operations is "step 1. write
code. Step 2. ask for commit bit". Sometimes it works the other way, but not
as often.

~~~
sliverstorm
Of course. It's not that commit access is my goal, it's that I'd want my work
to stand a chance of being integrated into the kernel instead of rejected out
of hand, and I've never been sure just how much that happens w/ no-names. If
it's horrible code, then yes reject it, but besides esoteric drivers it's
always seemed like a bit of an old-boys-club to this outsider.

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njharman
I'm surprised no one here has mentioned what I see as pretty obvious.

Startups are __perceived __as the quick way to fame and fortune.

There are not a lot of apparent Startup opportunities in the kernel space.

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kunjaan
I don't checkout Linux source because I don't have the skills to ...ooo look
at that shiny app.

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papachito
He's comparing KDE and Gnome core components (window management) and the linux
kernel with developing iPhone apps. That's a bad comparaison in my opinion.
Hacking on an operating system kernel or a window manager requires great
skills that most kids (and adult devs) do not have.

A fair comparison would be iPhone apps Vs KDE or Gnome apps. And here KDE and
Gnome get tons of new contributers each months, check how active is
<http://kde-apps.org> for example, or the Ubuntu developer activities. Tasks
that require less skills will always attract more developers or cooks or
whatever in all professions.

Here's a Graph of KDE contributers [http://dot.kde.org/2009/07/14/growth-
metrics-kde-contributor...](http://dot.kde.org/2009/07/14/growth-metrics-kde-
contributors) up to July 2009. As a KDE dev that follows the mailing list, I
can tell you the list of contributers is still groing well. Not to mention all
the people that build KDE apps without being official KDE devs.

~~~
blasdel
Bingo — to me the stereotypical KDE app developer is a 15-year-old boy from
somewhere in Europe.

~~~
jff
Well that would explain some things...

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fuxx0r
Without reading the article i can say that the following reasons are not
attractive for young developers:

1\. They have to read tons of documentation and cant use a 2 lines tutorial
2\. They have to know byte compiled languages 3\. They have to know lot of
internal stuff to use linux the good way

The point is, everything which is hard to understand and cant be learned
within 8 hours sucks... thats the way most younger people think about
developement because they have no motivation at all to be a part of a long
growing environment.

Hate me now ;)

