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posted by cmn32480 on Tuesday October 10 2017, @11:04AM   Printer-friendly
from the me-me-me-me-me-me-me-me-me-me dept.

Submitted via IRC for TheMightyBuzzard

In an age of political animus, increasing hostility toward "others," and 24/7 media coverage that seems to focus on the negative, a recent article in Frontiers in Psychology provides a glimmer of hope, particularly for those who live in the United States.

Written by Yale University academic Gabriel Grant, "Exploring the Possibility of Peak Individualism, Humanity's Existential Crisis, and an Emerging Age of Purpose" aims to clear up two competing views of today's cultural narrative in the United States. First is the traditional view of the next generation—millennials—whom many view as individualistic, materialistic, and narcissistic. Some even refer to millennials as "Gen Me" in response to those who develop their "personal brand" with selfies and social media posts.

In stark contrast there is a view of millennials as rejecting selfish values and leading America into a "great age of purpose." Unlike previous generations, simply earning money is not enough for them—significant data shows that younger people are searching for purpose in their lives and their work. Consider the fact that the non-profit group 80,000 Hours (whose name represents the amount of time spent at work in the average lifespan) even exists. 80,000 Hours provides career advice to help young people build careers with social impact. Universities and businesses are increasingly following this path to help millennial workers achieve their goal of finding purpose in their lives.

Both sides can provide reams of anecdotal evidence that supports their view of millennials, and until recently, there have been few studies on the issue. In his article, however, Grant theorized that Google's digitization of millions of books and the Ngram Viewer, a tool that shows how phrases have appeared in books, could allow a quantified analysis of culture over the past two centuries, and he used this approach to quantitatively test the popular notion that a drive for purpose is increasing. What he found is encouraging.

Yeah, because people with a healthy ego would never possibly do volunteer work...

Source: https://opensource.com/article/17/10/rise-open-source


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  • (Score: 2) by Thexalon on Tuesday October 10 2017, @02:42PM (3 children)

    by Thexalon (636) on Tuesday October 10 2017, @02:42PM (#579823)

    Sometimes it's about scratching your own itch. But sometimes it's because you work for some open source vendor and your boss wants a certain feature in the daily build by Friday. On the big-name projects, it's more often the latter than the former.

    That's one reason I prefer RMS's vision of "free software" over ESR's vision of "open source": Sure, it's better to have the source than not, and both of them give you the source, but the "open source" model tends to create a situation in which the work is being done to satisfy a vendor rather than being done to satisfy developers and users. The vendor at best just gets in the way, and at worst makes things much much worse (I'm looking at you, Red Hat and systemd).

    --
    The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
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  • (Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Tuesday October 10 2017, @05:05PM (2 children)

    by Grishnakh (2831) on Tuesday October 10 2017, @05:05PM (#579895)

    The vendor at best just gets in the way, and at worst makes things much much worse (I'm looking at you, Red Hat and systemd).

    Terrible example. systemd solves real problems, though perhaps it doesn't do the greatest job of it, but most important is that it isn't forced on you. Now why it's been adopted wholesale by almost every distro is debatable, and may make you feel like it's being forced on you, but it's not: there are distros like Slackware still out there which don't use systemd. (Gentoo also, I think.) If it's that important to you, you can switch to one of those. I suspect so many distros adopted it because there just aren't many good competitors that are as full-featured: upstart and OpenRC just don't do the same stuff, and also possibly laziness (not wanting to reinvent the wheel). It's too bad we don't see this same drive to standardize on a single solution with other things like DEs.

    A better example is some particular open-source products I've seen, like Magento (e-commerce suite) where they give you the code, but it's almost obfuscated: no comments or documentation at all whatsoever. Good luck making any sense of it, and extending it to do what you need. Or, of course, instances where they'll give you the source code to certain FOSS components on a system, but not to the proprietary bits that run on top, and no access to the build system at all or a way to reprogram your device with a new build. This is basically "TiVoization".

    • (Score: 2) by Thexalon on Tuesday October 10 2017, @05:38PM (1 child)

      by Thexalon (636) on Tuesday October 10 2017, @05:38PM (#579916)

      Terrible example. systemd solves real problems, though perhaps it doesn't do the greatest job of it, but most important is that it isn't forced on you.

      What real problems does it solve that was not addressed better by other systems that existed prior to its creation? About the only thing I can think of is the problem of me being able to easily go through my logfiles using normal text tools. And while you're right that I can and do avoid it on my own systems, I can't on boxes that are run by my clients and for whom "Red Hat" and "Ubuntu" are brand names that give them comfort or at least pass CYA muster.

      And if we're talking about other cases where the vendor technically complies with the FOSS licenses but certainly doesn't follow the spirit of it, the elephants in the room are Android and OS X.

      --
      The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
      • (Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Tuesday October 10 2017, @06:57PM

        by Grishnakh (2831) on Tuesday October 10 2017, @06:57PM (#579968)

        And while you're right that I can and do avoid it on my own systems, I can't on boxes that are run by my clients and for whom "Red Hat" and "Ubuntu" are brand names that give them comfort or at least pass CYA muster.

        I don't see the problem here. What if your clients instead decided that only the brand names "Microsoft" and "Apple" gave them comfort, as so many companies do? You should be glad your clients aren't at least that bad. I'd like my job better if they had a servant bringing me an Earl Grey tea in the morning, prepared exactly the way I like it, but I'm not going to complain too hard that it doesn't have that perk. I'd also like my own reserved covered parking spot, but again, I don't realistically expect these perks from jobs these days.

        And if we're talking about other cases where the vendor technically complies with the FOSS licenses but certainly doesn't follow the spirit of it, the elephants in the room are Android and OS X.

        Elephants in the room? Those are well-known examples (particularly in the case of Android) of Tivoization. Locked bootloaders are completely against the spirit of FOSS, no question about it.