[kortilla]

Yes, every institution is default dead without constant recruitment of young people to the cause. Most things won’t make it past a generation because everyone fails to focus on how to pass it on.

It’s not too late by any means, but it’s looking very bleak for Free software with most kids’ computing being smartphones and cloud services via chromebooks.

[Roark66]

Indeed. The FSF is a very worthy cause. If it is true there is a lack of young people involved I'd look for reasons why amongst things like "is it a pleasant space to cooperate in", "are people accepting of new people"? I never had anything to do with FSF directly, but whenever I dealt with people involved with heavily "politically charged" projects like guix, guile, linux-libre and few others in addition to very nice people I always encountered complete idiots that would try to chastise me for example for having the audacity to report problems running a nVidia gpu. Or one person told me flat out he will not answer any of my questions regarding a programming language syntax because I admitted to be making a non-Libre package for my own use. It is 100% bonkers. You may say so what, it's just one person. Every community has idiots, right? Yes, correct, but in case of these projects I had dealings with the toxicity is rather bad to the point that only very dedicated people stay. This also means the communities are tiny and it's much more difficult to get help when you're just starting out.

I think that's why we don't see many new people flocking to FSF projects.

[scottLobster]

Honestly this is a sign that times are relatively good. Most people of any stripe have little desire to engage in politics for its own sake, and FSF is fundamentally a political entity. When the only people participating are the radicals and crazies who make it their whole identity/want to play revolutionary, that means all the normal/reasonable people have better things to do. It's when things are so bad that the normal/reasonable people are forced to participate that you get effective political organizations.

Perhaps FSF has solved all the problems the community at large deems as worth solving.

[fennecfoxy]

Yes, people on the extreme ends treat FOSS etc almost as a religion. Humans are wont to get very tribal, unfortunately.

[freedomben]

wow, that's wild. I get the appeal of living in the world you want instead of the world that exists, but at the end of the day that approach is self-defeating.

It makes me wonder if a new org isn't what we need. I love the FSF and feel they did a tremendous service to the world, but the religious extremism limits their appeal only to true die-hard believers.

[sodality2]

I would not say it's all doom and gloom. I just founded a FOSS/Linux club at my university. There are going to be some kids who are so interested in technology that they go down a rabbit hole of different communities, open source included.

I definitely agree that the general trend towards less advanced technology will harm that though (some 18yo's don't even know how files work because they just use Mac's Finder), but some cohort of the generation will _always_ be interested in digging deeper.

It perhaps doesn't help that the general attitude of someone in FOSS/tech in general could be perceived by the average person as elitist or exclusionary - I try my hardest to challenge these notions.

(Let's see if one of the other founding members of the new club will read this comment)

[NavinF]

> some 18yo's don't even know how files work because they just use Mac's Finder

Huh? Finder is the macos equivalent of explorer.exe and it's the GUI for the file system. I assume you're taking about Spotlight which searches the entire file system and the internet much like the Windows start menu.

Anyway people have been making claims like this for as long as computers have been around. Smart people use Spotlight and the start menu because it requires fewer keystrokes than typing full paths or clicking 10 times to navigate a directory tree with Finder. It would be stupid to avoid using the fastest tools available

[sodality2]

I mean people who are literally unable to navigate directories because they drop all their folders on the desktop, and use exclusively Spotlight to find these files. Of course it makes sense to use Spotlight - I use the equivalent on Linux - but I still know how to navigate a directory, unzip a zip file, etc when many people simply never learn that.

[NavinF]

I refuse to believe that a smaller proportion of people know how to navigate a directory and unzip a zip file today compared to any prior year. A lot of people didn't know how to use computers at all a decade ago because they didn't have any kind of computer at home, not even a smart phone

[Master_Odin]

When I TAed a CS1 course for a handful of years, I'd definitely say easily like 1/4 of the class would also end up needing a general primer of basic computer usage.

Ultimately, some people are just not interested in technology or using it efficiently.

[kortilla]

It peaked and is in the decline. The number of households with desktops/laptops is in the decline. Fully native tablet+phone is the way a bunch of kids are growing up. Only computer usage in our local public schools is chromebooks.

[NavinF]

I don't believe you. A quick google search finds several charts showing monotonic increase and zero charts that show a decrease.

https://www.ibisworld.com/us/bed/percentage-of-households-wi...

https://www.statista.com/statistics/748551/worldwide-househo...

[causi]

The whole "charging for distribution is fine but charging for development is wrong" thing is what keeps me well away from any kind of involvement with FOSS groups.

[falcor84]

I don't believe anyone ever said that you can't charge for development. The only issue is that you're not allow allowed to limit people's right to distribute it. Once you already developed it and have given access to one person, it's up to them whether to pass it forward.

It's just like if you tell someone a joke. You can still claim credit for coming up with it, but not to stop its propagation.

In particular, you can still make money as a developer by asking for it upfront, whether from an employer, or patrons, or early access, or whatever model. Similar to how Netflix might pay someone upfront to develop a stand-up comedy special

[kiba]

I don't get where you get that idea of not charging for development.

That said, I basically never seen anyone charge for a distribution. I figured that people think there's no point, so they just don't.

Now, charging for development? That absolutely happens.

[saltcured]

Exactly. It isn't really possible to discuss this without "copyright" and that is why RMS focused on that topic. Conventional commercial copyright in practice is making a monopoly of redistribution and then burdening the distribution cost with additional cost-recovery and/or profit-taking.

I charge for development of (F)OSS. It's my salary. My employer likewise charges the patrons/funding agencies. But we get paid once for the effort, like any usual labor contract. We don't try to get paid again when our past work products are copied.

In the old days, paying a distribution cost was more common for free software, when it actually took effort such as writing and shipping media. This handled the case where someone asked for a distribution, so that sharing did not become a financial burden. It's a mostly obsolete concept now with pervasive internet and many low cost or free hosting options to put content out there at essentially zero marginal cost to deliver copies.