alt Hacker NewsI think Arduino and RPi demonstrate that there is still a relatively strong attraction for tinkering. In the past, freedom meant a lot to tinkerers. My sense is that this is not so true today. Perhaps I am wrong. It may be that few people respect licensing enough to care. As long as somebody (not necessarily the producer) has made a youtube video of how to hack something, that's good enough.
This was probably always true. Replace youtube with Byte magazine and it was probably the same 45 years ago. I wonder if the percentage of true FOSS adherents has changed much. It would be a bit of a paradox if the percent of FOSS software has exploded and the percent of FOSS adherents has declined.
Note: I mean "adherent" to mean something different than "user".
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I don't think tinkering is the dominant culture behind tech anymore, but it's definitely operating at a higher scale than ever before. There's more OSS projects than ever, and there are tons of niche areas with entire communities. Examples could include: LoRa radios (or LoRA adaptors!), 3d printing, FPGA hacking, new games for retro hardware...
> I think Arduino and RPi demonstrate that there is still a relatively strong attraction for tinkering
Raspberry Pi is an interesting example because it is constantly criticized by people who complain about the closed source blobs, the non-open schematics, and other choices that don’t appease the purists.
Yet it does a great job at letting users do what they want to do with it, which is get to using it. It’s more accessible than the open counterparts, more available, has more guides, and has more accessories.
The situation has a lot of parallels to why people use Windows instead of seeking alternatives: It’s accessible, easy, and they can focus on doing what they want with the computer.