Will young developers take on key open source software?

It’s a problem confronting many of the open source software pioneers who transformed the technology world in the 1990s and early 2000s.

Their ethos was that anyone could contribute to the development of an open source application or operating system – and the software and underlying code could be used, modified, and distributed for free.

The open source movement broke the stranglehold of big technology companies, spurred innovation and underpins much of today’s technology landscape.

In 1999, Loris Degioanni made his first contributions to an open source network analysis tool that eventually became Wireshark, as part of his master’s thesis. “My concern was graduating,” he says, not succession planning or the long-term future of the project.

Almost 30 years on, Mr Degioanni is now CTO and founder of cybersecurity firm Sysdig, which is a key sponsor of Wireshark.

“We’re approaching the time when the founders of these early open source projects are starting to get old,” he says.