Technology

The short of it is that the standardization and OSS of the 90s was an anomaly, allowed by commercial interests taking their eye off the ball at a critical time. The challenges are that those commercial interests have the hang of things now and for new developments are all over making sure things develop in a way more consistent with their strategies.

For example, if AOL back in the day had made 'campus edition', then we might never have seen a federated internet, with AOL providing the "modern" connectivity and communications features before Mosaic could spawn Netscape and spell the end of AOL's strategy, which was miles friendlier than NNTP, Gopher, IRC, and various BBSes of the time. All those ultimately fell to the browser in one way or another, but AOL could have easily beaten the federated answer to the punch, except they neglected academic, government, and business market.

Same for Linux, it was enabled by the Unix vendors neglecting the user experience and also the opportunity opened up by the PC clone ecosystem. If people weren't already replacing most of the user-facing stuff in their Solaris workstation with open source stuff, they might not have had such an easy time going to Linux on much more affordable hardware. If Sun had done Solaris PC edition with something more competitive with KDE, bash, and all the utilities, then Linux might not have been "worth it".

So in the 90s, they let their guard down and a federated internet happened with lots of open source viable all over the stack. With the massive investment since, that facet has been "contained" to the places where it's pretty much unassailable now, but the evolution and growth of that mindset is firmly throttled by the business interests.

anyone working with FOSS should be celebrated much more. They are the people who make the world better for all of us while money grubbers are driving it to hell.

git gud.

And it's not that hard. Here's a primer:

• git clone - download a copy of a repo (do once)
• git checkout - change branches (-b to create a new branch); a branch is a set of changes (commits, state of the code) and you can easily jump between them
• git add - select files you want to commit (submit to the project)
• git commit - do the commit; etiquette for the message is one line brief summary of the change, then a blank line, then optional additional paragraphs with more explanation
• git push (-u origin <branch name> the first time for a new branch) - send the changes to your online repo

When you run into problems, ask for help. Each team does things a little differently, so you'll want to ask your lead before doing most other git operations.

I'm a lead and I'm happy to sit with new team members for a half hour and walk them through the basics and with their first few commits. Everyone seems to catch on pretty quickly.

being a developer is about seeking out problems in the world and solving them with science

Eh, let them try and fail at starting their own thing. It turns out, writing software is hard, and writing good software is even harder, especially when you need to build it from scratch. FOSS is a wealth of pretty good code that you can build off of to make cool stuff quickly.

But it doesn't build itself, FOSS needs people to maintain it, and at some point you'll need something nobody else wants to build. But maintaining that thing takes time, and people out there will help you with it once you build it. So build your thing in such a way that it can solve other use cases, and people will start using it, and some will contribute to it, solving their own use cases because it's easier than making their own thing.

That's what FOSS is, it's a community effort to share solutions to problems so others help you make it better. You benefit from their work, and they benefit from yours, and everyone is better off. Businesses are easier to build on FOSS, as are hobby projects, so share as much as you can so you don't have to maintain it yourself.

I honestly don't see a business case for not using and contributing to FOSS extensively. It's just too expensive to build or buy everything yourself.

You don't need to gate keep to only those with a quest to solve problems, just appeal to human nature and demonstrate that FOSS is good for selfish pursuits as well. It turns out that a rising tide (FOSS) lifts all boats.