• Mojave@lemmy.world
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    4 days ago

    Original creators and maintainers are hitting retirement age.

    And not many good younger people are available to take the mantle.

    This is the long-term cost of how persnickety FOSS maintainers are when it comes to accepting outside contributions to their work.

      • Mojave@lemmy.world
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        4 days ago

        if a maintainer doesn’t want your sticky grubby toddler hands fuckin in their cookie jar, it’s their fucking cookie jar and they can tell you to fuck off.

        Yeah, that is exactly how it works. And doing that leads to your tool dying since you have no clue how to foster a community to take care of it.

      • 🦄🦄🦄@feddit.org
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        4 days ago

        Yeah it’s really a mystery why no one wants to step up with well-regulated people like this one in the space.

        • inbeesee@lemmy.world
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          4 days ago

          Yeah, this is a terrifying response that chases away young talent. I saw a comment mentioning how the mature devs are cut out and don’t have the chance to help pull up the new dev/give them training and wisdom.

          If the older maintainers don’t have time for new devs without all the experience they gained over a lifetime, then FOSS is in for a crash.

      • chloroken@lemmy.ml
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        4 days ago

        Jfc your replies in this thread are so cringe. Gatekeeping boomer energy.

      • TheObviousSolution@kbin.melroy.org
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        4 days ago

        You are pretty much the case in point: Grossly stereotyping the alternative into a perspective only based on extreme prejudice with an ample amount of pet peeves projected from personal experience. Like, I was actually expecting to see at least one valid counterpoint, like how much corporate interests shit on and ransack OSS, or the inherent dichotomy between software maintained out of goodwill in an environment that’s increasingly defined by greed and intellectual property bullshit inside failing economies, but nope.

    • jj4211@lemmy.world
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      4 days ago

      Note that this isn’t exclusive to FOSS, but it’s just more transparent.

      Over the last decade I’ve seen my work retire and replace with something not quite the same about 3 times now, owing mainly to some lead retiring and the replacement getting to finally throw it all away like he thought should have been done years ago.

      But even in the more mundane case of things continue, it happens all the time in long standing corporate projects. Sometimes you can catch a whiff of a strong shift in direction (e.g. Windows 8 went hard on UWP and actively discouraged development using any of the long standing interfaces that Windows applications were traditionally built on). An announcing of retiring doesn’t mean anything will necessarily change at all, or if it changes in a bad way there may be course correction.

    • inbeesee@lemmy.world
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      4 days ago

      It’s gotta change to true community, where we lift each other up, looking to the future, readying others to take our mantle when we retire. That’s the only way FOSS will thrive and have a chance to compete with corpos.