The future of FOSS, SWE and Technical Education

The last year or so has been a roller coaster for the software ecosystem. LLMs have gotten dramatically better. The number of FOSS projects and contributions has shot up, along with the slop that comes with them. Non-technical people are now able to build solutions that would have taken months of engineering time and effort, just using natural language.

In an effort to preserve their craft, AI skeptics have argued about the quality and reliability of these tools, and some have even vowed not to use them. Optimists on the other hand have handed these tools the keys to their entire digital lives. I've talked to multiple FOSS maintainers, students, and engineering leaders over the last few months, and there is a certain sense of confusion and ambiguity in everyone's minds about the future of open source, of software engineering as a career, and how we teach and learn software.

It's too early to say whether Software Engineering is truly dead, but it is clear that these tools are going to have a massive impact on the future of FOSS and technical education. This panel is an effort to initiate a discussion around this existential crisis that surrounds the FOSS community and sit with that discomfort.

• FOSS

  • How are projects reacting to the contribution flood?

  • What happens to collaboration when solving your own problems becomes easier

  • Rethinking Open Source terminology ("FOSS", "Maintainer") when everyone has a FOSS project?

  • Pitfalls of relying on proprietary AI systems, and moving towards Libre AI

• Software Engineering and Technical Education

  • The junior developer crisis

  • AI assisted vs AI generated code

  • AI and the blank canvas problem

  • What do we teach and how? Computational thinking, interdiscplinary learning and problem solving

We will also discuss how the FOSS United Foundation plans to expand its scope to creating a broader digital commons ecosystem, supporting people over projects as part of its maintainer programs, and teaching computational thinking under the learner programs.