It’s not just familiarity, it’s lack of awareness of the history of how we got to here.
Part of what made OSS into what it is was the last 30 years of advocacy. A lot of those advocates are now middle-aged and thinking more about retirement than about the next wave of OSS that needs to supplant the Big Tech that OSS built.
Back in 2001, OSS development centered around mailing lists. https://marc.info/ is a graveyard of OSS mailing lists that largely died off somewhere between 2010-2015. Just as most of the earlier wave of OSS folks were having kids and settling into their middle-tier jobs with the Big Tech firms they helped build.
Gen A / Gen Z needs to step into the advocacy shoes that the Gen X / Millenial OSS advocates filled 20-some years ago. Figure out where next-gen OSS will be built and get to it.
Agreed. That’s my point exactly - some folks pulled the ladder up behind themselves, others just kept their head down and stuck to their own project. Far too few maintained the advocacy loudly enough to maintain the momentum or to keep their corporate overlords honest. And now, projects are dying from lack of maintainership. nginx-ingress is a good example.
the xz supply-chain attack highlights another issue confronting modern FLOSS efforts. what’s a community to do when their software is the target of nation-state actors interested in playing geopolitical games with their software? and now they need to grapple with AI-generated bug reports, AI-generated contributions?
It’s an interesting time. I wish I had better ideas about what possible solutions might be.