Why Linux is not attracting young developers

The author (and his commenters) have clearly never worked on any open source project. There is plenty of ego to be had for things like webcam drivers. Plus, if you have that webcam, it goes from non-working to working, and you can share that with everyone else in the world. Pretty fun.<p>Thinking about all the software I use regularly, I know pretty much all the authors. Some of them I have even met in person, and they have gotten free beer as a result.<p>I guess if you are outside the community, it doesn't seem very exciting, but if you are in the community, it is exciting. Kind of the opposite of high school cliques...

Linux is not attracting young developers because most young developers don't have problems that need solving in the kernel.<p>The amount of change an individual developer can effect on a project is inversely proportional to the amount of code already written.

It sounds like the author is reacting to the flood of ooh-shiny iPhone app kiddies that have captured a lot of media attention lately, but I don't think these are the people who would have been attracted to Linux anyway. And I don't think it's fair to lump all this together into an amorphous concept of "Linux" when the problem is a bit more nuanced.<p>Linux, as a kernel and as a platform, has matured, but there's still plenty of opportunity for new people to explore new territory. Some of it may be extending the existing "boring" infrastructure, which the author seems to blame for turning developers away, but nobody should feel restricted to working on those things. There's still a lot of exciting application development to be done, and as an added bonus, if the platform needs improvements to support your application, you're encouraged to contribute those as well.<p>Also, if you want a counterpoint, the Arch Linux developers page certainly makes me feel old already: <a href="http://www.archlinux.org/developers/" rel="nofollow">http://www.archlinux.org/developers/</a>

As the person alleged to having made the initial remark: nobody at the Collaboration Summit panel said that Linux is not attracting younger developers. Every three-month cycle gets contributions from over 1000 developers, many of whom are new to the process. Attracting developers is not the problem.<p>The thing I was concerned about was the ageing of the core group of subsystem maintainers - who have been doing the same thing for a long time - and whether there was room at the upper levels for up-and-coming hackers. A real concern (though not a huge problem, yet), but a different one.

Is the iPhone to kernel developer comparison really sensible? It's two very, very different skill-sets we are talking about.

I think it is because the learning curve for a kernel is so steep that you will have to spend a lot of time and energy learning the kernel before you can do any significant development. It would have been more meaningful if the author had compared linux attraction to that of any bsd clones. Comparing to iphone is kind of misleading.

At least for KDE it feels like they are on the 3rd or 4th generation of developers. I am not sure how many of the developers from 10 years ago are still around.

Writing drivers is a less appealing than writing small apps regardless of platform.

I've wanted to get involved sometimes, but I always hear only the best developers get actual commits, and I know I am not an amazing programmer so I haven't bothered :(

I'm surprised no one here has mentioned what I see as pretty obvious.<p>Startups are <i></i>perceived<i></i> as the quick way to fame and fortune.<p>There are not a lot of apparent Startup opportunities in the kernel space.

I don't checkout Linux source because I don't have the skills to ...ooo look at that shiny app.

He's comparing KDE and Gnome core components (window management) and the linux kernel with developing iPhone apps. That's a bad comparaison in my opinion. Hacking on an operating system kernel or a window manager requires great skills that most kids (and adult devs) do not have.<p>A fair comparison would be iPhone apps Vs KDE or Gnome apps. And here KDE and Gnome get tons of new contributers each months, check how active is <a href="http://kde-apps.org" rel="nofollow">http://kde-apps.org</a> for example, or the Ubuntu developer activities. Tasks that require less skills will always attract more developers or cooks or whatever in all professions.<p>Here's a Graph of KDE contributers <a href="http://dot.kde.org/2009/07/14/growth-metrics-kde-contributors" rel="nofollow">http://dot.kde.org/2009/07/14/growth-metrics-kde-contributor...</a> up to July 2009. As a KDE dev that follows the mailing list, I can tell you the list of contributers is still groing well. Not to mention all the people that build KDE apps without being official KDE devs.

Without reading the article i can say that the following reasons are not attractive for young developers:<p>1. They have to read tons of documentation and cant use a 2 lines tutorial 2. They have to know byte compiled languages 3. They have to know lot of internal stuff to use linux the good way<p>The point is, everything which is hard to understand and cant be learned within 8 hours sucks... thats the way most younger people think about developement because they have no motivation at all to be a part of a long growing environment.<p>Hate me now ;)