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Why Linux Is Not Attracting Young Developers
judeancodersfront writes "Jonathan Corbet recently pointed out at the Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit that the Linux kernel team was getting older and not attracting young developers. This article suggests the Linux kernel no longer has the same appeal to young open source developers that it did 10 years ago. Could it be that the massive code base and declining sense of community from corporate involvement has driven young open source programmers elsewhere?"
would also imply more experienced developers. And that's not (necessarily) a bad thing.
Maybe it's because a lot of devs from the 90s were and are quite rude due to their lack of social skills. Most people don't put up with that kind of crap.
Dear Old People,
We're busy building iphone, android, facebook and twitter apps, with the delusion of a multi-million dollar payday.
BTW, thanks for all the open source stuff we're using.
Signed,
Young Developers
I've seen a lot of promising college-aged open source devs that seem to have an overwhelming reverence and awe towards the kernel, thinking it far too complicated for them to work on with their own programming abilities. In reality, most of them could pick up the kernel and figure it out quite quickly, but they'll never convince themselves of that.
Could it be that since Linux has become somewhat mainstream kernel developement is considered a "solved problem" to young programmers looking for an interesing project? Maybe new programmers are tackling other open source problems instead.
Could it be that there's not as many young coders that have the skills required? We've been trying for years to dumb down development and this may be part of the result. Perhaps if the kernel was written in PHP and javascript ...
Wow, I sound like a cranky old man.
Could it be that the massive code base and declining sense of community from corporate involvement has driven young open source programmers elsewhere?
Nah, they have all just decided to get paid, rather than work for free... (end.sarcasm)
:)
In all seriousness, a lot of the new generation of programmers are starting out in large corporations, as a means to repay student debt, get themselves established - and are able to do that code work in the open-source world, as corporate acceptance and utilization of OSS for application development grows. This, unfortunately, comes with a flipside - those same developers are not available to do the work the hobbyists were doing a few years back, leading to the perception that the OSS movement is losing developers. The movement actually isn't losing developers - more and more of them are just being absorbed by NDA's
Either that, or they have all decided to start writing flash games for Adult Swim.
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Or perhaps that there are opportunities - the Android and iTunes app stores - that weren't available ten or fifteen years ago.
Perhaps age difference itself is the reason. Young persons may not like the 20 years older hackers. And old wizened developers may dislike young whippersnappers.
Contributing to and old and large code is much more difficult than contributing to a small one. Getting your head around a large code base is no small task and documentation is often lacking. Even if the code is well commented it could be very difficult to understand the overall design of the software and how things interact with each other.
25 years ago when I started it was a literal *TURN* in technology. We got personal computer (Amiga, Comodore, Thomson, Atari) to not only to play , but also to *program* and show off other. Heck even on my first PC I cracked Ultima 5 because the disk stopped working , and found out which instruction NOP to go on (it had a very weak encryption using a XOR increased by 3 every byte). I digress but let us see basically many nerd, and by that I mean a lot of nerd, even non-nerd, started programming took a taste of it, then went on open source etc... Alot of oldies from mainframe are also part of that group. Nowadays ? *ALL* system are either closed , or too complicated to really go on (remember how easy it was to use CGA or even later mode 10h?) , and among the young nerd I know not many really start programming. There you have it. That in my opinion is alone to make people which would be interested into programming less numerous. And tehrefore less young people interested into open source. Naturally I might be wrong and just be a grumpy old man "it was better inmy old day, now off from my lawn".But it looks that way to my anecdotal viewpoint.
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that's all folks - the youngsters are much more socially connected and skilled than we were at their age; also, they get the clue of the social context much better than we did 15 years ago. And what they see is a career in an unregulated domain, totally havoc and chaotic, where the abuse and the overwork is the norm. there is no career path marks to follow and nobody can tell you where you going to be in 2 or 3 years. A continuously changing professional knowledge baggage is not attractive, its consequence is obvious - your whole time life should be allocated for keeping up. The dreamland of computing is not anymore there - the harsh reality has taken its place and young people are not stupid; they want to be able to enjoy their life normally instead to enslave to the corporate. 15 years ago the Linux and the Open Source was started with lots of fuel from people keeping strong to a beautiful idealism - this is gone; they are not to blame - myself I have respect for a generation who has the power of the dignity and the will to say NO! STOP! this is my life! - we should all do the same.If a profession takes away your life - forget it, it's just not wort it.
First, it takes a certain amount of financial security before most people are willing to contribute their time to any effort. I think this is true for everything from the Linux kernel to Habitat for Humanity projects.
Second, this greybeard phenomena is occurring throughout not only the entire s/w industry, but other technical fields in the USA as well. Not enough CS majors, engineers, scientists, etc. Math literacy is suffering and practically every company is screaming for more H1B visas. Or just sending the work offshore.
Finally, some of the noteworthy exceptions to this trend (Microsoft, for example. But also many other big corporations) have an ulterior motive behind keeping their staff green. Hire CS grads straight out of college, put them on a couple of projects and get them built. Once your developers start to get some industry experience and a peek at the big picture of the company, they'll start to second guess management decisions. Out the door with them and bring in some fresh meat.
Have gnu, will travel.
Could it be that the Linux Kernel isn't state of the art anymore? Linux is boring... it's bloated... it's no wonder that young blood aren't interested in developing it, they want to do something really cool and cutting edge to light their careers on fire!
I can't speak for the "young blood", being about to turn 40 in a few months and well past the age when I thought "lighting my career on fire" was a worthwhile goal, but I'd certainly agree that the kernel is boring. Part of it is definitely the emphasis on business applications; my interest in free software was always driven by what I wanted to do with it on my own time for my own edification, not to pursue wealth for myself or my employer. An even greater part of it, though, is that operating systems just aren't that damn interesting by themselves as long as they do what they're supposed to do, which is to provide a platform for actual applications. No one owns a computer to run an operating system any more than anyone owns a car to use tires. The OS is incidental to what users (and most programmers) want to use a computer for.
To be perfectly frank -- and to expand the scope beyond the operating system -- the thing that I have found increasingly unattractive about FOSS in general is that it all too often becomes an exercise in cliquishness and faddishness to the exclusion of actually serving users, to say nothing of just plain rudeness. The lkml is notorious for its rudeness (though it's a garden of civility compared to its OpenBSD counterpart). Any number of application projects are focused more on being proving grounds for a particular design methodology and/or programming language of the week than on delivering a good application to end users -- witness the gazillion projects whose name prominently features its implementation language, a detail that only the developers or would-be developers could possibly care about.
The end result is that FOSS projects all too often go out of their way to diminish their value and degree of interest to anyone outside their current circle of developers. Add to this the other common flaws of FOSS -- lack of decent (or any) documentation and poor or eccentric user interfaces -- and it's no wonder that, despite considerable strides over the last twenty years, most FOSS projects, Linux included, remain niche products at best.
Scratching an itch is fine, but when that itch is so narrowly defined as to be your itch and no one else's, no one else can be blamed for not giving a hoot. Follow that with an insistence that it would scratch someone else's itch if only they were hip and smart enough to itch like you, and you have a perfect methodology for achieving irrelevance.
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Probably not. Of all of the open source kernels available, Linux is the one that I'd be least interested in working on. For interesting features and clean design, I'd look at FreeBSD. For code quality, I'd look at OpenBSD. For interesting research type things I'd look at something like Coyotos or HURD (which does exist, is doing cool stuff, can run most POSIXy code, but isn't a mainstream OS), or something more esoteric like SqueakNOS. For something with a beautiful design that's relevant to modern platforms, I'd look at Symbian (nice kernel, shame about the userland).
Linux? It's become the antithesis of the UNIX idea of doing one thing and doing it well. For any given problem, Linux is probably okay. It's probably not the best solution, but it will do, and it has the advantage that it's a workable-but-not-ideal solution everywhere you want to use it. But exciting to work on? Absolutely not. The code is good in places, but horrible in others. There's no overall coherent design, bits are tacked on, different architectures implement the same thing in different ways without bothering with any kind of platform-independent abstractions.
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I think it's the fact that students these days are now first taught to program in Java, and very few spend any time gaining experience in C. I'm TA'ing a class in database internals this semester, and the class project is to implement a simple DBMS in C/C++, and about half the class is having a hard time because they're unfamiliar with the C++ programming. (And if you ask them to eschew OOP to program in straight C, there are probably even less people who could handle it.) The skills just aren't as common as they once were.
One only has to remember what things were like with Linux 10 years ago, in the year 2000, to know why the interest just isn't as strong today.
At the time, it had a massive advantage over the Windows 98 platform, which was the common desktop at the time -- it crashed constantly and required formatting every few months, and was vulnerable to total crap like TCP/IP flooding, running unlimitedly powerful .vbs scripts, typing "con con" into a console, and giving IE basically Admin access to your system through ActiveX. Doing anything from zipping a file to hex editing to writing code to making simple video and sound files required outright piracy and the use of horrible freeware -- friendly, open source, cross-platform apps and web apps weren't common. Winamp was a shining example of a great, free program back then, and it wasn't open source and came bundled with AOL crapware.
Linux, on the other hand was rock solid. It didn't crash, it had anything you needed readily available and installable. Need a web server, an IDE, a hex editor, an image editor more advanced than mspaint, PERL, an audio player, an IRC client or anything else? It was there, no running keygens or installing adware. Same with using existing things like ICQ, IRC, the web, usenet, etc. And they were actually competitive in terms of friendliness compared to what was on the Windows platform. You could also script them no problem from a totally OP command line.
But it was a terrible pain to install for a young amateur compared to just popping a LiveCD today. Have fun partitioning your HD with raw fdisk (cfdisk if lucky) and setting up XFree86 by hand to see any graphics. Try setting up non-PNP ISA devices with screwy drivers -- often you had to go hardware swapping for something specific, like a $10 Crystal Sound card. Try rebuilding the Kernel with an ALSA patch to get that to run. Try not using a packaging system for anything -- RPM was terrible at the time, you were better off just compiling things.
But socially, if you could pull it off, you were pretty elite. You had a solid, invulnerable, insanely powerful OS with every tool you'd want at your hands. It was rebellious against the suits and it had the promise of an open source world. The programming was much better -- OpenGL was way, way easier to write for than DirectX 6, which was just nasty, and was cross-platform to boot. The internet population was far more technical at the time and also respected it. Social networking / multimedia was years away from being mainstream at the time. Anyone who ran Linux wasn't a 'n00b' or a 'lamer' on primitive web forums, Usenet, IRC, etc.
Today? Windows XP/Vista/7 has been comparatively stable and isn't nearly as vulnerable, unless you're just stupid. There's mountains of OSS software out there for every task that runs under Windows, if it wasn't built to run under Windows. No one cares that you run Linux, and will just get frustrated if you can't run the 10% of things a PC can. Ten years ago, the biggest PC game -- Quake 3 -- ran great under Linux, but try getting MWF2 to run under it today.
So there's no real motivation to get into it now -- it doesn't have the appeal comparatively it did 10 years ago.
If some college kid can get better results than coders who have been working on the kernel for 20 years, then that's great.
Thing is, that is very rare at this stage of Linux maturity.
Hence fewer and fewer young new developers working on the Linux kernel each year. At this point, most of the new kernel developers who actually contribute are going to be experienced developers from other areas who have decided to work on the kernel, and young developers will need to work on smaller, less complicated projects to build experience.
Linus was able to start the Linux kernel because he was bright and nobody else was doing it. He got it to work, and work pretty well, but it was nowhere near as good as it could have been. Every year since then the experience needed to be able to work on the kernel has grown. This is not some arbitrary level they are setting; as the quality of the code improves, the quality needed in order to contribute to the project increases. Quality code generally comes from experience in dealing with the myriad of programming pitfalls one experiences throughout the years. Linus and the other early kernel developers have simply grown with the project; they are much better programmers than they were when they started out, so they move right along with it.
Security is mostly a superstition... Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. - Helen Keller
Have any of you guys ever looked at a picture of the Linux kernel?
My best guess [and I am not trying to be facetious] is that unless you were in on kernel development in the very early days [so that you had some hope of learning it when it was still tractable], then the thing has gotten so big now [what is it - like 20,000 files which get compiled in the basic kernel?], and the learning curve has gotten so steep, that no new developers have any realistic hope of grokking it anymore.
Seriously - at this point, just learning the kernel would be akin to a 6- or 8-year PhD project [in something like a Department of Archaeology, studying ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics].
Anyone notice Linux share the same syntax of UNIX?
Yup.
Do you know how old UNIX is?
Yup. Developed in 1969; making it 41 years old. Linux was developed in 1991.. Linux today is a far cry from Linux back then.
To start Linux even old people like me need to know some history of XENIX, UNIX, SCO, NFS ... some of those things remain unformatted text base, console type (not VT100). GUI is good, but the back is still those things, that why Mac OSX hide them all. Linux need to clean up those history and simplified those things.
I don't know if you are referring to using a Linux distro or programming on the Linux kernel.
I use Gentoo Linux every day. I use the tools provided in portage daily to do the computer-y things I like to do. I use XFCE for my desktop environment, Firefox (mostly) for web browsing, various text editors, etc. etc... but my favorite tool is the command line. I can do so many more things in a lot less time at the command line than with a GUI - even web browsing (love links).
I was born in 1988; 21 years of age. I've been using Linux since 2001 or so.
My fiancee also uses Gentoo Linux, as I got fed up with supporting WinXP and all the junk that accumulated on it. She's been using it fine for the past few years, running a very similar setup to mine. We are the same age.
I don't do any kernel programming, however I do various application- and web-level programming. Never anything past user-space... and that is simply because that is where my interests lay... I've always been more into building programs that do stuff for me, rather than kernel programming / hardware interfacing (at the kernel level).
I still use Emacs proudly. I find big bloaty IDEs like Eclipse get in the way
Really, the only thing you are saying here is that you like YOUR big, bloaty thing over someone else's big, bloaty thing. There's really nothing insightful about that at all.
You have a set of tools you are comfortable with, and others have theirs. Each have their merits and each have their drawbacks. What is new is not necessarily an improvement and what is old is not necessarily the best. To discard either out of hand on their "whiz-bangedness" or "tried-and-truedness" rather than on its merits is the mark of a fool.
The
You are confused. One minute you claim long winded text entry for 30 years beat tools designed to replace the drudgy or trivial stuff is better, then you claim you write noddy script to toy server duties. A developer, as it a real developer and not some perl dweeb, doesn't touch server admin. So what is it? I suspect you're a low skilled UNIX package user that's been using packages for your job, but you dabble in code for trainee level work.
IDEs have a place, they can get the cruft out of the way, if you're development time is cheap, you're not a real developer. Get back to your 10 line "scripts".
...the thing that I have found increasingly unattractive about FOSS in general is that it all too often becomes an exercise in cliquishness and faddishness to the exclusion of actually serving users...
(emphasis mine)
You've just hit the nail on the head - FOSS comes from a Unix culture, and Unix has never been concerned about the end user. In the Unix world, the System Administrator is the end user, so the entire thing is geared toward making things easier from an administrative point of view. This is why everything is command line based, everything is kept in plain-text config files, etc. Linux obviously inherited this from Unix, and FOSS has inherited this from Linux. Only the rare project like OO.org and others that are plainly and obviously intended for people who are not going to be willing or able to modify the software have any kind of focus on serving the user.
Case in point, look at GUIs in Linux. KDE gives you a billion options, GNOME gives you three. For heaven's sake, is there no middle ground? And neither one of them look as nice as OSX or Windows, though they do now seem to be competing with a version of Windows that is almost a decade old.
Seriously, this is why only nerds and masochists use Linux. For anybody who doesn't feel like spending all of their time tweaking the operating system, they just use Windows or OSX. There is nothing Linux can do that either of those can't, am I supposed to torture myself just to save 50 bucks on the price of a computer? Get real.
That turned into a bit of an anti-Linux rant, but it all comes down to the fact that people are going to develop for the systems they use. If more people want to use Windows, more people are going to develop for Windows. Add to that a barrier to entry of 4 million lines of code, and it's no wonder new developers are shunning the Linux kernel.
Security is mostly a superstition... Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. - Helen Keller
The best C developers I know, are or were admins at one point.
Writing software for servers is a fuckton easier when you actually understand what a server does and what goes on from the admin point of view.
A decent developer that understands administration if FAR better than some hot coder that doesn't have the security insight of a gnat.
You know at those 'BIG' sites you see on the Internet ... facebook, wikipedia, myspace, google ... guess what ... All of their senior level developers ... regularly play admin as well to deal with large problems.
I'm going to have to wager that you are a developer with no admin experience and little actual development experience since you don't recognize something thats pretty common.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
I can do so many more things in a lot less time at the command line than with a GUI - even web browsing (love links).
1) You can do a tiny subset of the things you can with a GUI in less time
2) But the things the GUI can do that the CLI can't, you can't do at all
3) And the things you can do on the CLI faster, you can still do in the GUI pretty damned fast (assuming you're adept at using one)
When people say "oh the CLI is great, it's all I need", that's a good way to tell that that person doesn't compose music, edit photos, layout pages, edit video, etc etc etc. If all you do with your life is copy and rename text files, then sure: use the CLI. But that's a pretty sad life.
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