There's a lot of work to be had doing maintenance and training in FOSS software rather than developing. It's not as glamorous, but it's of equal if not greater importance, since those using FOSS often need it due to low budgets (and therefore can't always expect highly trained employees).
But the bad news is that your bio says you're Brazilian, and the FOSS scene has been really bad in Brazil since Temer. Government has cut a lot of investment in developing national open source software, and even critical government bodies like the Receita Federal (IRS-equivalent for english-speakers) are now back to being fully reliant on windows licenses.
I've even heard that national banks want to migrate their ATM systems and networks to Microsoft systems, and they use shitty software like Teams for """security reasons""".
We're in a bad state, but if you want to work on FOSS, you should try to think small. Social Assistance centres, small firms, maybe even research, that sort of thing.
But in the end, free software is free infrastructure, so don't be surprised when you see big techs funding what's supposed to be their antithesis if it marginally reduces their internal costs.
Thank you for your reply (and everyone else's replies as well)
I have the privilege of being able to get out of the country, I'm currently in the US visiting family and working for a small business, it's been about a month. A family member living here managed to get me in the company. It's been pretty meh so far, only done some webdev work (they didn't even put the site live) and IT assistance (installing PCs and such). They have their own management software that (I think) they're selling, which is not ideal but capitalism™. I don't yet have the know-how to make any contributions to it, unfortunately. I'm entering my second year in university and I'll come back to Brazil when it starts.
Even in Brazil, is entering the academic or research field hard? I can get a (sorry if not right name in English) doctorate, post doc, master's, etc since I can find jobs that pay enough to provide for myself while studying due to my qualifications and my parents helping me if I need to. Honestly I'd kill just to get a job at Pine64, System76 or the FSF.
Sorry if I'm too naïve or enthusiastic about all this, I'm still very new to the job market and stuff. (20yo also)
Getting into academia in Brazil is arguably way easier than in the USA or other Global North countries (for foreigners) because our public universities are free and the competition is not too tight. We have a national test for computer science master's programmes, kinda like ENEM. Here.
But academia is its own particular brand of hell no matter which country you're in, so if you're thinking about it first try and get through most of the course with good grades (for selection programmes) and consider doing a Master's before getting set on a doctorate programme.
If you do an undergraduate, a master's and a doctoral degree back to back, assuming nothing goes wrong, you'll be stuck in academia for at least 10 years of your life, and that's not an easy decision to make.
There are possibly also undergraduate research assistant positions in your college, so you could check those out to see if the research lifestyle is right for you.
Since you're young, if you focus your interests on areas that are commercially interesting for open source projects (like the aforementioned Pine, or low-level systems that corporations depend on but can't be bothered to develop), it's possible you could end up working in the area. But along the way you'll have to work on lots of non-free software jobs in order to survive, but also just to learn how to become a better professional.
This is just the way it is right now. It's not a moral failure to engage with capitalism while living under it.
BTW, I'd advise you not to post too much identifying information on internet forums. You never know what kind of person might find it, and once it's on the web it can be really hard to erase it.
If you can get a good job writing closed source software that gives you a decent quality of life and gives you the free-time to contribute to some open source projects outside of work I think you'll still do good for FOSS. Don't let perfect be the enemy of the good.
At the end of the day we have to be realistic with ourselves about the world we find ourselves in and the limits of the power of an individual in it. Starving for the sake of some imagined purity or living a lower quality of life isn't Marxist. As long as you're not directly abetting the imperialism machine by working for some ghoulish NATO defense contractor I don't think you have that much to feel badly about.
That said there's things like programming around helping coordinate mass transit and provide info to travelers. Programming for industrial machinery including especially in areas not related to manufacturing of goods like power, utilities, and though that's pretty specialized if you can get your foot in the door you have a fairly interesting skill-set. Government jobs for government agencies are also an option.
There are companies that write open source software that isn't free to companies (e.g. they charge for use when used as part of a profitable enterprise or sell support packages to large enterprises) but they aren't that great in number and to get in the door you've a better chance if you have something on your resume already which means unfortunately working for a for-profit, usually closed source company.
Hypocrisy is good and well for the idealist to worry about. The realist however cares more about feeding the children, feeding themselves and doing what they can with what they have. There is in the FOSS movement a certain idealism among many that think via free computing they can free humanity when in reality you must via revolution free humanity to free computing. FOSS is a rebel insurrection against capitalism but not one that can ever change the superstructure or base in any meaningful way on their own.
Never forget under capital you are forced under duress to sell your labor, it is not your fault, you are not a bad person for doing so and for doing so under conditions less than ideal for people who uphold a way of doing things you find philosophically repugnant.
So try, try to find something that fits these ideals but if you cannot, do not feel too badly.
capitalism will make it impossible for me to exercise my profession in a good way, but is there no alternative that fits in the middle anywhere?
One possibility is to find organizations that you like and do IT work for them. Especially for budget conscious lefty groups or nonprofits, they would very likely appreciate any FOSS software recommendations.
I work for a company that writes software electric and gas’s utility companies use to coordinate power hungry iot devices like thermostats and evs to make power consumption less spikey and more predictable , which lets them supply demand more with solar and wind as opposed to coal peaker plants.
The utility gets a massive savings when peak demand of electricity and gas is controlled more, and pay our company as well as pass a portion of the savings directly to the device owner as a rebate on their utility bill (device owners sign a contract to let utilities manage their devices through us, but every control event has an opt out option so that the device owner can choose not to participate, but the less they opt out the more money they save on the utility bill)
Guix as an OS made me shit myself, yell at the computer many times, and curse David from System Crafters for ever showing it to the world. And that's with almost 10 years of Emacs experience, a loooot more Linux experience, and good enough scheme to muddle through.
It's great as a supplementary PM though. And when used in that way you get everything guix offers appart from system configuration, but you get to use other PMs, like the ones required by the programming language you're using.
If you want something solid you can depend on, especially when you forget to update and don't really need the newest features, Debian will carry that need. I love that distro and it's good to have installed as a backup tool even if you don't think it's a good main choice for you.
This is similar to Marx's critique of freedom under liberalism as merely 'formal'. The problem is the gap between that can exist between a nominal right and practical exercise of that right.
This kind of problem is common with rights-based approaches to justice and can be witnessed with human rights broadly. Its identification isn't unique to Marxism, either; liberals sometimes get at it with the phrase 'equality of opportunity', for example. To say that opportunities can be unequal (and that this is a problem) is to admit that justice requires the guarantee of more than just formal rights. I'd say this a problem that has shaped liberal 'privilege' discourse as well: privilege is just such a kind of gap that allows (or constitutes?) the persistence of injustice in the face of nominal/formal/legal equality.
Like in other cases, I'd say that the four fundamental software freedoms get at something genuinely important, and that it's better to have them, even just formally, than not. But like with other freedoms and rights, it's easy to conceive of them too 'thinly'. They need to be fleshed out with a more general awareness of power relations and of the practicality of their own exercise.
To some extent, that awareness of software freedom as situated within power relations is actually already present in free software discourses, which talk often of things like subordination, domination, subjugation, etc., from the start. Unsurprisingly, that dimension is largely absent from the 'open-source' perspective.
GPL and similar licenses which enshrine these four freedoms are legally actionable. You could argue how actively a bourgeois law apparatus respects them is dubious. But I don't know what you mean by idealistic here. Are you saying that the four freedoms do not guarantee freedom in reality?
richard stallman may disingenously call the copyleft licensing as "idealist pragmatism" but it has nothing of idealism. It is a materialistic approach through and through, they studied the current intellectual property laws and designed the copyleft license to use intellectual property laws for their goals!
open source =/= free software, richard stallman extensively wrote about this. i think you may be confusing open source with free software.
I find that the classic "copyright wars", de Raadt vs Stallman/ BSD vs GPL arguments about freedom are really analogous to idealism vs materialism.
"Ours is the most Free", the idealists preach. "You can take our stuff and close it and sell it if you like! Yours carries authoritarian restrictions!".
And this is true, but those restrictions insist on the spread of freedom, in that you're forced to grant others the same freedom you enjoyed.
Look at how Microsoft took a lot of BSD code and profited from it, giving nothing back. Where is BSD now and where's GNU/Linux?
Often we just need to accept the paradox that sometimes freedom must be imposed and that maximalist, idealist freedom includes the freedom to exploit others and limit the fruits of their "freedom".
This is 100% correct, and why no one should be using "permissive" / soft / weak copyleft licenses. All they do is permit corporations to take your work, extend it and then close it off, under liberal notions of freedom.
Ironically, a lot of corporations who began by extolling the virtues of "open source" are now changing over to source-available restricted licences. At this point, licenses like MIT seem to exist only for the small developers who hope to use their open source projects as a vehicle to jump onto the payroll of established companies.
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