The former is focussed on tinkering, nostalgia, tool-building, wheel reinventions, and half-finished build-and-forget spare time projects.
The latter has successfully applied high-friction chokeholds around startup culture which makes the cost of entry for new business ideas far higher than it really needs to be.
There is almost no blue sky development equivalent to the original Internet, the Mother of All Demos, and the desktop computing model - and associated projects - created at PARC in the 70s and early 80s.
It's all very "mature", incremental, slow, and me-too.
And so expensive, both financially and in terms of developer time.
I'd love to see a renewed interest in attacking this from both ends - a movement to really push the imaginative limits of what's possible, while also being implacably humane and user-oriented and indifferent to ad tech, tinker tech, and pre-commercialised cloud tech.
There's just certain things they can't do because their incentive is stuff you constantly pay for all the time.
I'd love to be part of something like old 90s revolutionary software.
But I've noticed close to zero interest from the dev community in anything like that.
Everyone mostly just wants to play with sorting algorithms or write their own small language, unless they're getting paid a whole lot. It's become a sport more than an engineering discipline.
It's hard to imagine Excel or BitTorrent being written now.
Heck, it's hard to even imagine web browsers with JavaScript being written now.
What kind of projects would you like to see/work on?
the basic problem is fragmentation and assembling a community of interest.
I don't want a new language, or a new preprocesser, or a new way of thinking about programs... I just want a one click way to take a folder of HTML that looks like a static site, and package it up into cross platform apps with all the proper API access.
I don't care about cryptocurrency and global decentralized databases, I just want to be able to run a site by buying a NAS appliances, putting files on it, and sharing the QR code on it without any signups and cloud accounts.
The hard problems are mostly solved. There's probably some long dead random github repo that does anything you want. They're just not packaged for all platforms and maintained professionally.
I don't need a phone without any binary blobs at all... I just want a mesh network feature and a fair trade stamp.
Because... it sucks to maintain something novel even if it's all just pieced together from npm. It sucks to be the one responding to issues. It sucks to actually run a project and keep track of devops stuff.
All the tech has been invented dozens of times over, but never polished, and always ruined with some unnecessary immutable log feature or performance destroying random access low latency routing thing like IPFS has.