Will young developers take on key open source software

Daniel Stenberg Daniel Stenberg works at his laptop which has stickers on the backDaniel StenbergDaniel Stenberg first released his open source software in 1996,Many of us have prepared instructions and critical information for our family in the event of our sudden demise. For Daniel Stenberg, that includes passwords for his Google and GitHub accounts.

That’s because he’s the founder of curl, an open source internet transfer engine that has been downloaded billions of times and is used to transfer data to and from computer servers.It was first released by Mr Stenberg in 1996 and is now used by millions every day.It's important that someone is able to maintain curl when he steps away.“I just want to make sure that everything is there so the day I go away, someone can take over,” Mr Stenberg says.

It’s a problem confronting many of the open source software pioneers who transformed the technology world in the 1990s and early 2000s.

Their ethos was that anyone could contribute to the development of an open source application or operating system – and the software and underlying code could be used, modified, and distributed for free.The open source movement broke the stranglehold of big technology companies, spurred innovation and underpins much of today’s technology landscape.

In 1999, Loris Degioanni made his first contributions to an open source network analysis tool that eventually became Wireshark, as part of his master’s thesis. “My concern was graduating,” he says, not succession planning or the long-term future of the project.

Almost 30 years on, Mr Degioanni is now CTO and founder of cybersecurity firm Sysdig, which is a key sponsor of Wireshark.“We're approaching the time when the founders of these early open source projects are starting to get old,” he says.Sysdig Loris Degioanni wearing a t-shirt smiles while being interviewed by someone out of shotSysdigLoris Degioanni has been working on open source software Wireshark since 1999

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While projects do come and go, he explains, some remain relevant over the years, and founders and maintainers usually want to ensure they live on while there is demand. That’s not just because they’ve invested time in developing the code itself, but also because they have spawned communities, both virtual and in the real world.

But while the likes of Mr Stenberg and Mr Degioanni can take action to ensure the keys to the kingdom are passed on, ensuring there is someone to pass them to can be a challenge.

Many in the open source community worry there are not enough younger developers willing to get involved in contributing to or maintaining projects. This is often unpaid work after all.Even Linus Torvalds, the creator of Linux, the operating system which kick-started the open source revolution in the early 1990s, noted at the Open Source Summit Europe in September that the “kernel maintainers are aging”.A

manda Brock, CEO of OpenUK, a non-profit organization which represents the UK’s open technology community, says younger developers might not appreciate the grip that closed software companies had in earlier decades.“You've got a next generation who haven't engaged as a philanthropic community and volunteer community in the same way, at the same scale.”There are technology barriers to address too. Many key open source projects were originally written in C, a coding language first developed in the early 1970s.While C is still taught in universities, it is no longer widely used in the commercial world, Mr Degioanni explains. “The fact that C is the main language makes it harder