Opinion A "Youth and Open Source" panel was held at the United Nations (UN) Open Source Program Office (OSPO) for Good conference in the UN building in Manhattan. There was only one little problem with it. To quote Ruth Ikegah, a young Nigerian open source project manager, "We need more young people here because I see a lot of old people here."

She nailed it.

Even as an old guy myself, I noticed this. Indeed, Jim Jagielski, Salesforce's Head of OSPO, and I had talked about how gray the conference was. Part of that was the nature of the meeting, where most of the people were senior government, NGO, and open source leaders. But, if we're going to change the world for good with open source, we need to grab the attention of people who haven't turned 30 yet.

You see, Jagieski and I go to many tech shows every year, and very few of them welcome young people. True, the Linux Foundation events all now come with child support for young parents, but my expert guestimate is the average age is still well into the 30s. At one time, most open source conferences were gateways to newcomers. That's no longer the case.

There are exceptions. The North Carolina-based All Things Open shows welcome people new to Linux and open source. More specifically, the Cloud Native Computing Foundations (CNCF)'s KubeCons have many tracks for people who want to learn the ins and outs of Kubernetes and other cloud-native programs. Most events, however, are now meant for experienced open source folks ratehr than early career folks.

The OSPO for Good conference proposed solutions that have been suggested before, such as hackathons, to engage young developers in open source coding. If implemented effectively, hackathons have the potential to be game-changers. There's nothing quite as exciting as building something new and useful in real time.

For example, awards were given to several teams of young hackers who created projects that addressed the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) from the UN SDGs. These included projects to coordinate mobile disaster alerts, recovery resources, and water resource management in global South countries. But we must do much more to attract new blood to open source. It's not like this is a new problem.

Back in 2010, James Bottomley, a top Linux Kernel maintainer and Microsoft Partner Architect observed at the Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit: "There are more gray beards [in the Linux kernel]. The graying of the Linux kernel is going to continue until people start dying." Andrew Morton, a senior Linux kernel developer, added, "Yes, we're getting older and more tired. I don't see people jumping with enthusiasm to work on things the way that I used to."

Spoiler alert: it's 14 years later, and it's still as much of a problem as ever.

Some of that comes from the nature of the problem. As David Nalley, president of the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) and director of open source strategy at Amazon Web Services (AWS), said at the conference: "Getting people to maintain old code isn't easy. For experienced programmers, it leads to burnout, and younger developers want to make new things. Who doesn't?"

As Darrick Wong, the former Linux XFS file system maintainer, put it in his resignation note last year, "I burned out years ago trying to juggle the roles senior developer, reviewer, tester, trigger (crappily), release manager, and (at times) manager liaison. … I thought if I could hold on just a bit longer, I could help maintain the focus on long term development to improve the user experience. I was wrong."

Yes, creating Linux and open source software is rewarding, but it's also hard work. Honestly, a lot of it is work that requires sharp-eyed, energetic developers.

The Linux kernel community is trying to recruit new programmers. Shuah Kahn, a Linux Fellow and kernel maintainer, oversees the Linux Kernel Mentorship program and other efforts to attract wet-behind-the-ears developers to the Linux kernel.

She also runs the LFX Mentorship program, which seeks to sponsor and train the next generation of open source developers and leaders. This initiative covers a wide variety of open source projects.

That's all well and good, but we need to do more. The open source community needs young people; and frankly, young people, developers, writers, or leaders need open source software. It is how software is made, and we need to make sure it continues to be made well. ®

https://www.theregister.com//2024/07/15/opinion_open_source_attract_devs/