Ask HN: After almost 30 years the romance is over - What now?

Try to think of how computers and software could make things better and work on that. I don't mean how they could look cooler or play games faster, but how they could help social progress or enable revolution or democracy in the third world or how they could pull people out of poverty and death.

These 2 phrases:

"Instead of the free sharing of ideas...I'm encountering more and more the attitude of a guarded sharing...the real knowledge and experience seems to be held back because it...might be used to turn a profit somewhere"

and

"Todays big topics leave me pretty much unenthused"

I hear a lack of motivation, not for technology, but for the specific purposes to which technology is being put- squeezing a buck out of things.

But you're mistaking the impact that incentive structure has on your motivation for a lack of motivation about the technology itself. It doesn't work that way.

I suggest finding a way to spend time with organizations that have a different incentive structure. Find someone you know and talk to them about how they use technology. It wasn't entirely deliberate, but looking back, I can say I found a way forward when I started working with non-profits and helping at schools.

It takes a little while, but being around people who have a non-financial mission, and then being able to deploy what are still in those areas incredibly useful and rare technical skills- this feeds the motivation engine.

Making money is really important, and it's very visible; the context in which the work happens is invisible, but it's even more important.

So- it may take some time and thinking, but I would advise- stop thinking about the details of the sausage. Server side, client side, mobile, whatever- it's all just sausage.

Think about purpose and incentive structures.

The note you wrote is evidence that this matters to you, and that, like a vitamin deficiency, you're missing the motivation that comes from a different sort of incentive structure.

I would also respectfully disagree about the open source revolution being over. For technical, social, economic reasons, looking at the trend lines, it is very far from over. Open source, free software- this lives in and feeds an ecosystem that is not about making a buck, and there are healthy and growing areas in which these incentives are dominant. That OSS and FS can be consumed by other ecosystems- that's fine, the world as a whole is healthier when you have a balance of both. This is precisely why FS licenses are written as they are- the act of creating a tool to a certain degree has to be agnostic about the uses to which the tool will be put. But OSS and FS are still growing, and gifts are everywhere being created.

Good luck.

This is good advice, the problem is that you are suffering burn out. !0 years sounds about right. You need to get back to your roots and one way I recommend to do it, is to get into embedded. It gets you back into a small reward loop where little things net positive feedback. The other thing that I recommend to people is get closer to a research discipline. If you are really that burnt out, try applying your trade to a secondary science that you are interested in, chemistry, Bio-Engineering, astronomy something like that. There are a lot of cool projects that need help with code.

Empower the non-technicals. Help students and researchers in medicine, law, humanities, communication and the arts make better use of technology.

There are boatloads of abandonware tools and libraries that real people depend on for their research, work and livelihood. I am talking about things as varied as sensor data capture software running on MS-DOS, to high-schools that have one PC for every 100 students. There are opportunities everywhere, look around and give someone light.

"everything" isn't going to be free until everything is free. It's not fair to expect people to just freely give away software for nothing in return when the rest of society doesn't work like that. People say "oh but you can just use the credibility of your free software to get a higher paying job". Great, so I'm back in a cubicle. I'd rather be writing software I'm interested in.

There was actually nothing new learned in free software from a capitalist point of view. "Loss leader", thin and thick margins, it's all been covered before.