Joe Fay
Technological journalist
Daniel Stenberg
Daniel Stenberg published his open source software for the first time in 1996
Many of us have prepared instructions and critical information for our family in the event of a sudden disappearance. For Daniel Stenberg, this includes passwords for his Google and Github accounts.
Indeed, he is the founder of Curl, an open source Internet transfer engine which has been downloaded billions of times and is used to transfer data to and from computer servers.
It was published for the first time by Mr. Stenberg in 1996 and is now used by millions of people.
It is important that someone is able to maintain the loop when they go away.
“I just want to make sure everything is there, so the day I go, someone can take over,” said Stenberg.
This is a problem confronted with many open source software pioneers that transformed the world of technology in the 1990s and in the early 2000s.
Their ethics was that anyone could contribute to the development of an open source application or an operating system – and that the software and the underlying code could be used, modified and distributed free of charge.
The open source movement has broken the workforce of large technological companies, stimulated innovation and underpins a large part of the technological landscape today.
In 1999, Loris Degioanni brought her first contributions to an open source network analysis tool which ultimately became Wireshark, as part of the thesis of his master’s degree. “My concern was my diploma,” he said, and not in planning the next generation or the long-term future of the project.
Almost 30 years later, Mr. Degioanni is now CTO and founder of the SYSDIG cybersecurity company, which is a key sponsor of Wireshark.
“We are approaching the moment when the founders of these first open source projects are starting to age,” he said.
Sedative
Loris Degioanni has been working on Open Source Wireshark software since 1999
Although projects come and go, he explains, some remain relevant over the years, and the founders and maintainers usually want to make sure they live while there is a request. It is not only because they have invested time in the development of the code itself, but also because they have generated communities, virtual and in the real world.
But while Mr. Stenberg and Mr. Degioanni can take action to ensure that the Kingdom keys are transmitted, ensuring that there is someone to pass them may be a challenge.
Many in the open source community fear that there are not enough younger developers ready to get involved in the contribution or the maintenance of projects. It is often unpaid work after all.
Even Linus Torvalds, the creator of Linux, the operating system which launched the open source revolution in the early 1990s, spoke to the Open Source Summit Europe in September that the “maintenance of the nucleus aged”.
Amanda Brock, CEO of Openuk, a non-profit organization which represents the community of open technologies of the United Kingdom, says that young developers may not appreciate the grip that closed software companies had during the previous decades .
“You have a next generation that has not been committed as a philanthropic community and volunteer community in the same way, on the same scale.”
There are also technological obstacles to contact. Many key open source projects have initially been written in C, a coding language developed for the first time in the early 1970s.
Although it is always taught in universities, it is no longer widely used in the commercial world, explains Mr. Degioanni. “The fact that C is the main language makes the attraction of a young generation more difficult.”
Open
Amanda Brock says that young developers are not as active in the open source community
There are ways to get around this. Mr. Degioanni says that Wireshark and another project he has founded, Falco, is based on “plug-ins”, which can allow new features to be written in different languages.
Mr. Torvalds gave his blessing to the adoption of rust as a programming language for Linux, while noting that the “discussion rust against C has taken almost religious connotations in certain fields”.
With regard to management projects in the future, managers and maintenance people have the opportunity to submit control to the foundations. The Cloud Native Computing Foundation, for example, oversees 208 projects, with more than 250,000 contributors. Wirehark has his own independent foundation, with Mr. Degioanni as a member of the board of directors.
Getty images
Will young developers take open source software?
Not everyone subscribes to the foundation model. Stenberg and his collaborators kept Curl completely independent. “I am much better without being in their neighborhood and simply directing my own neighborhood,” he says.
And the foundations are always faced with the question of guaranteeing a regular offer of new developers to maintain projects alive, he notes.
Miss Brock says it is essential that the open source community considers how it encourages young people to participate.
It is a question of showing that even if being a contributor can be difficult, it is also an improvement in the career, giving young people an entry into established ecosystems and an opportunity for finesse and to highlight their technical skills.
“It is a way to help the talented talent,” adds Miss Brock. “Because people can work at home in the United Kingdom or any country in which they are.”
Degioanni is more bloody. Even if there is “probably less visceral enthusiasm” for the concept of open source, he says, the fundamental idea of being able to modify software is now a fact.
And, he continues: “I worked with open source all my life. I created my own projects. I saw people join the projects I created. I saw people start their own open source projects. »»
In the end, he says, there is a “joy, especially for a young person” in the creation of software, seeing him be used and trigger a community.
“This feeling does not age,” he says. Even if the pioneers who popularized the first open source projects do so.
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