Hello!

I’m a CS student, have been a FOSS lover for a long time and am a commie since recently (a year or two). I was thinking of my future career and as much as I’d love for there to just be an easy, free and open approach to using my skills, capitalism just makes it all impossible. I know thay 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?

There just seems to be for profit software if I want to actually get a decent wage and a decent life. How can I get a decent job with free software? The idea of it just inhibits it while on the capitalist mode of production.

TLDR: how can I be a FOSS dev while not caving to the interests of big techs and corporations to provide for myself (aka be a hypocrite)?

Thank you for your time reading, cheers from Brazil!

  • albigu@lemmygrad.ml
    3·
    9 months ago

    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.