The LLM part is bad news but it isn't the sign.
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There are plenty of good alternatives to driving your community off a cliff like a gaggle of demographic lemmings, but if you're still convinced that mailing lists and insularity are the path to durability in this godforsaken year of our lord two thousand and twenty six then I'm not sure what words will convince you that there's nothing at the bottom of that cliff but sharp rocks and seawater.
If your community isn't accessible and welcoming to new, learning participants, the clock's ticking.
@mhoye I don’t know that it matters if it’s hard to contribute with the amount of funding surrounding the kernel being so vast. It’s also telling that “contribute” in this context is usually restricted to a very small subset of contributions (that is: shipping code and enduring abuse from code maintainers)
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There are plenty of good alternatives to driving your community off a cliff like a gaggle of demographic lemmings, but if you're still convinced that mailing lists and insularity are the path to durability in this godforsaken year of our lord two thousand and twenty six then I'm not sure what words will convince you that there's nothing at the bottom of that cliff but sharp rocks and seawater.
If your community isn't accessible and welcoming to new, learning participants, the clock's ticking.
@mhoye Linus and his posse have been elitist unwelcoming jerknobs for decades though. If an alternative were to appear, I agree that people would leave them to wither and die. But so far no reasonable alternative has appeared. *BSD, Plan9, etc have all failed to gain traction.
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Today the number of people under 50 who'll reach for perl or raku or who cares what it's called as their first choice of tool for anything new is zero. In practice Perl is an esolang now.
Torvalds' position is that contributing to the kernel should be _more_ difficult for everyone else, but, through LLM usage, easier for existing kernel developers.
Ted Tso's adamant position that "you can't make us learn Rust" is the same insularity.
If the kernel was a country, we'd recognize this.
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And for Linux as a plausibly community-managed meaningfully open as in open project, that clock is definitely ticking.
The end of this road is some corporate-funded retirement home for understaffed and underfunded projects once enough of the current devs have aged out without anyone growing into those roles, with private forks at companies that relied on the kernel, also privately relieved there's no need or reason to deal with antediluvian developer processes or bother giving back anymore.
Anyway, funny story but remember when the discussion was about The Cathedral and The Bazaar?
There's a second axis to that graph, and it's ends are labelled "A Community" and "A Cult".
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@mhoye the kernel is a country and it is the united states of america which is actively waging war upon another sovereign state
@hipsterelectron @mhoye you know, I keep beating parts of this drum in conversations with euros
all this "sovereign" tech talk and yet all of them do not seem to have done the slightest bit of analysis on transitive dependency chains
"sovereign distribution, built in europe on european infra" -> look under the hood -> ubuntu
one of the best examples I reach for: "what happens the day you can't reach qemu/kvm source anymore?"
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@mhoye The "under 50" edit to this just feels like twisting the knife. It's not like it was inaccurate before, but then you had to make it worse.
@fedward Sorry. We hosted a Perl users group meetup at my old shop more than a decade ago, and even then I was the only person under fifty in the room. And now, I'm not under fifty anymore.
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@mhoye Linus and his posse have been elitist unwelcoming jerknobs for decades though. If an alternative were to appear, I agree that people would leave them to wither and die. But so far no reasonable alternative has appeared. *BSD, Plan9, etc have all failed to gain traction.
@hal_pomeranz If it's up to me to pontificate, I think it will happen sooner than people might expect. It will either an explicitly anti-AI OS like NetBSD or a pure fork that focuses on a welcoming community and modern tooling.
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@hipsterelectron @mhoye you know, I keep beating parts of this drum in conversations with euros
all this "sovereign" tech talk and yet all of them do not seem to have done the slightest bit of analysis on transitive dependency chains
"sovereign distribution, built in europe on european infra" -> look under the hood -> ubuntu
one of the best examples I reach for: "what happens the day you can't reach qemu/kvm source anymore?"
@froztbyte @mhoye it puzzles me frankly particularly the rust part. rust is a microsoft fucking product now but nobody listens to packagers about bootstrap deps. i used rust for 10 years and made the zip crate the safest and fastest zip impl ever and i cannot contribute code to that system again until gccrs is complete
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@mhoye "Torvalds and others repeatedly said low-quality contributions from new developers should receive low priority, and that the community should stop trying to make contribution easy. Many developers said, repeatedly, that trying to mentor those developers is almost always a waste of time; they do not listen."
@gvwilson That part specifically and personally hurt to read.
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@froztbyte @mhoye it puzzles me frankly particularly the rust part. rust is a microsoft fucking product now but nobody listens to packagers about bootstrap deps. i used rust for 10 years and made the zip crate the safest and fastest zip impl ever and i cannot contribute code to that system again until gccrs is complete
@hipsterelectron @mhoye ito puzzlement, my thesis as to how we got here is: 12~15y of "developer ease"
over the years of flush vc cash shartups, so much focus has shifted from the _outputs_, instead moving to the _personal_. many good engineering things got traded out, simply to "be comfortable"
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@hipsterelectron @mhoye ito puzzlement, my thesis as to how we got here is: 12~15y of "developer ease"
over the years of flush vc cash shartups, so much focus has shifted from the _outputs_, instead moving to the _personal_. many good engineering things got traded out, simply to "be comfortable"
@froztbyte @mhoye having worked on python packaging until they suddenly released "oh wait this guy is going to make things actually good" https://web.archive.org/web/20250218154403/https://cfp.packaging-con.org/2023/talk/hpuhu7/ and then having astral steal credit for my work and sell to openai and then seeing
uvpop up fucking EVERYWHERE having fucking EVERYONE rave about HOW FUCKING FAST IT IS when I FUCKING DID THAT SHIT—i think labor needs rights and protections -
Anyway, funny story but remember when the discussion was about The Cathedral and The Bazaar?
There's a second axis to that graph, and it's ends are labelled "A Community" and "A Cult".
@mhoye While I think the Perl metaphor is very selectively remembering history and over-estimating the importance of languages, I don't entirely disagree with the conclusions about Linux.
But it won't matter a bit. Sure, this means you get fewer volunteers. But beyond "cult" and "community" you're missing the fourth C of Linux - corporations. There's already plenty of paid developers, and if those aren't elevated community members anymore but regular code-doulas-for-hire from the start, it's probably going to be enough for quite a while.
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To explain what I mean by this: for a long time the Perl community took great pride in how difficult and terse the language was. The old joke that well-written perl was indistinguishable from line noise wasn't just a joke, it was a badge of honour.
That attitude was sustainable when the internet was small and alternatives were scarce. But the moment tools appeared that prioritized things like human ergonomics (python) and human interaction (ruby) the perl community started aging out and dying.
@mhoye honestly, perl deserves to die at this point. It served a purpose for a while but that day should be long gone.
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@gvwilson That part specifically and personally hurt to read.
@mhoye @gvwilson The kernel community is more than mildly interested in alternatives. When you have literally thousands of people showing up throwing slop at you, what do you do to retain your sanity and the quality of your code base? Nobody wants to turn away developers who want to actually learn the kernel and be part of the community, but identifying those people takes time and resources that simply aren't there. -
@mhoye "Torvalds and others repeatedly said low-quality contributions from new developers should receive low priority, and that the community should stop trying to make contribution easy. Many developers said, repeatedly, that trying to mentor those developers is almost always a waste of time; they do not listen."
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@gvwilson @mhoye how to identify well-off new contributors with money for conferences: "Ojeda said that there is a need to deprioritize these contributors, but that we still need to find talented people to join our community. That means finding ways to focus on the people who actually matter. For example, the people who take the time to go to conferences are much more likely to stay around."
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@mhoye nobody new wanted to learn before either. you saw less of these people because they had no way to submit plausible work. So AI has certainly enabled a new kind of spam. But this doesn't indicate the pre-existing, tiny pool of new people who genuinely want to learn is any different. there have been so few people like that for a long time. the "genuine learners" more often want to do their own thing, not work on *your* project. This is why AI is making such an impact on Linus and others.
@zzzeek @mhoye From my perspective (also as someone who has repeatedly tried to spin off new projects and build up what could've become forks, but which usually fails because people really want to do their own thing even if it dooms everyone involved to insignificance), this has always been roughly the case, but "nobody" is still a misnormer. Some people want to learn. But LLM-based contributions completely drown them out in the noise.
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@gvwilson @mhoye how to identify well-off new contributors with money for conferences: "Ojeda said that there is a need to deprioritize these contributors, but that we still need to find talented people to join our community. That means finding ways to focus on the people who actually matter. For example, the people who take the time to go to conferences are much more likely to stay around."
@gvwilson @mhoye and also how many women are at this meeting and here's one of them: "Shuah Khan said that she can identify the people who will stick around fairly quickly, and some of the new folks who have come in are excellent. For this reason, she still spends a lot of time with people sending spelling fixes. "
️ Sorry for the multiple tags, just a mind-blowing organization there...
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To explain what I mean by this: for a long time the Perl community took great pride in how difficult and terse the language was. The old joke that well-written perl was indistinguishable from line noise wasn't just a joke, it was a badge of honour.
That attitude was sustainable when the internet was small and alternatives were scarce. But the moment tools appeared that prioritized things like human ergonomics (python) and human interaction (ruby) the perl community started aging out and dying.
@mhoye @gunchleoc that’s … not my experience of the Perl community. Yes, there was a certain delight in Perl Golf tournaments, but that went hand in hand with a test infected culture of programming even before Test Driven Development was a thing, and there was a strong culture of documentation as well.
In professional work with Perl I always strive for clarity and readability and so did most of the people I knew in the community.
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Anyway, funny story but remember when the discussion was about The Cathedral and The Bazaar?
There's a second axis to that graph, and it's ends are labelled "A Community" and "A Cult".
@mhoye the demographic parallels are spot-on. My quippy take has been for a while that if a project/community/company hasn’t undergone and thrives after a change of top leadership, it’s still immature.
Sounds like that immaturity will persist into old age for most of the popular things these days.
