All of us use open source in our day-to-day life, often as tools to make living. However, there is a looming danger in the open-source community. To illustrate it, here’s a quote from the Register:

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."

With more people going into retirement like James Gosling - the creator of Java - did recently, there is a risk of many crucial projects left undermaintained in the long run. Another quote from the Register:

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?"

I wanted to end this post on some positive note, like “contribute to open source - it’s fun”, but sometimes it is not. So, I dunno, I don’t have a solution at hand.

#opensource