Maybe instead of military service & studying for dumb interview questions, college students should be required to write a piece of open source software that gives back to the community. 25 years ago, before software was as equated with corporate world domination as it is today, 20-24 year old males used to sit in their dorm rooms engaged in a coding war to avoid spending $20 for a dumb image viewer, database, web server, or something.

A lot of the modern concentration of wealth into just 3 companies is over software that college students would have cloned & everyone would have owned, 20 years ago. The software generation X saw as something they could invent in their spare time is seen by generation Z as something that requires giant corporations or government programs. Instead of complaining about censorship on social networks, generation X wrote their own tools to circumvent the censorship.

The lion kingdom figured out long ago that you can't spend your entire life writing open source software. After age 24, people move on to other things, families, kids, divorces, making money to sustain the government. The window for a personal software project has always been 20-24.

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