I think to say "not even a developer" connotes surprise. I wouldn't expect to see someone whose dayjob doesn't involve programming work on something like an Emacs package.
> I wouldn't expect to see someone whose dayjob doesn't involve programming work on something like an Emacs package.
Twenty years ago, I maintained some Free Software projects. I wasn't employed in IT at all, in fact at the time I was studying towards a soft humanities field, and all my knowledge of programming was self-taught. So much of the other Linux software I used seemed to come from similar people. After all, the draw of Linux and GNU tools was that you were free to tinker with your computer and teach yourself from books, no expensive commercial software required.
I get the impression that laypeople developing and maintaining packages has become less common as the open-source movement took off and more paid employees at corporations started to do these kind of tasks. Similarly, the premiere "news for nerds" site today is Hacker News, which comes out of the corporate world, while its forebear Slashdot of the early millennium had a more varied mix of professional IT people and hobbyists.
I think this is the biggest loss we've had in the past 20 years. The takeover of open source by "professionals" has lowered the diversity of perspectives in open source.
Some of the most renowned folks from my generation or the one before me are not professional software engineers. And those people were the ones that valued Free Software more than the ones who are professional software engineers.
I often wonder if this is one of the bigger reasons why FOSS is doing so much worse these days.
Yes,yes, yes. Is it a cultural thing why this gets lost? Is it the abscence of an enemy (Microsoft?)? Is it the cultivatism of kids today who are willing to pay for the download while 20 years ago Napster boomed? Is it the everything can be monetized and professionalized attitute vs. amateurism? I truly wonder.
I am 45 and I experienced the net and hackerism of 20 years ago as a wonderful world which it is no more today and I can't really say why.
Perhaps it has to do with the rise of the "precariat"? Younger nerds are more worried about trying to survive than hacking Free Software for fun? It is often claimed that basic income would give a boost to such volunteering.
I don't think it's that it got lost, but rather that a lot more money got into open source development. While I was at school I was really interested in hacking on Mozilla, where they were espousing ideals about meritocracy. After a while I realized that it really mean the folks they employed to work on Firefox had all the power, simply because they had more hours per day changing everything so casual contributors couldn't keep up.
It made sense for them, of course, since they can't hire that many people and just have them sit on their thumbs all day.
This is only tangentially related, but I've always thought it was interesting, so I point it out whenever it's applicable...
John Kemmeny (one of the inventors of Basic) wrote a book in 1972, "Man and the Computer," summarizing the development of the computer up until that point, and making some predictions about the future. He was surprisingly accurate, and predicted the internet, online encyclopedias, computers in every house, and a lot of other stuff.
There was one big thing that he was wrong about, though. He expected that in the future more or less everybody using computers would have a basic understanding of programming, and be able to automate simple tasks for themselves. I think if that prediction had come true, open source projects developed by amateur, non-professionals would be a lot more common.
For a while, it looked like things were headed that way, but at some point companies realized they could make more money if computers were primarily used for media consumption, and so the interfaces and expectations about users have been getting dumbed down ever since.
