It's been 45 or so years since the free software movement started and hardly 1% of professional programmers make a living by developing free software.

And of those being able to make a living, most are developing "enterprise open-source software" (like Kubernetes, Prometheus etc.) which the general public is never going to use.

#freeSoftware

@njoseph the vast majority of programmers overall works on software that the general public will never use

@lain @njoseph this tbh, games and general-purpose office applications are a miniscule part of the software developed, even software with a user interface or that gets run on any personal computing device probably isn’t actually the larger part of what is developed overall

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@hardbass2k8 @lain @njoseph and even among software with a user interface, a vast majority of programmers are working on the nth copy of a PHP website editing configuration files, or making minor tweaks to code from elsewhere that only applies to their specific situation. Among those who create original software worth sharing, the share of FOSS programmers looks a lot more decent than 1%

Having said that, it does feel like the mindshare for FOSS has decreased, not increased, since the 90's. The number of FOSS projects is larger, but the proportion of developers who understand and care about FOSS ideals has gone down, maybe severely. I'll partially fault those of us who learnt those Free Software principles alongside coding, but then failed to pass it on as well to the newer programmers - we were more eager to write Blog posts about Haskell monads and about how to send your users through your startup funnel, than to write about why Free software is important and what that vision of the future looks like.

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