Ask HN: Why is the demoscene more alive in Europe than N. America?

When I first entered this industry and earned substantially less I was really into producing open source and software demos without any hope of receiving a financial reward for it. I wanted to simply produce cool tools, learn improved automation techniques, and become a better developer. I believed that if I became a much better developer I could earn much more years later and also achieve far more interesting work. I had incentive. I still write open source software and I still enjoy it. My personal interest in software is really the only thing that keeps me from burning out.

Software developers make a lot of money in the US and Canada. Some areas of software development must work much harder than other areas just to achieve and retain employment. In my area of frontend development with JavaScript there are a lot of jobs that pay well and you don't have to be very good to get them. There is less incentive to really go above and beyond by writing new technologies to do amazing things.

In Europe developers make substantially less. There is the potential to make as much as their North American counter-parts but only if they are near the top of their profession. The incentive to self-improve and do cool things is absolutely there, because you have to work harder to earn that higher income. At some point a European developer also has to perform some level of self-reflection if the passion isn't there and realize they could be earning far more money working less hard in a different profession.

>The threat of software copies was recognized at least as early as 1976, the year Bill Gates wrote his infamous “open letter to hobbyists” bemoaning the illegal distribution of Microsoft software, but it wasn’t until the mid-80s that laws were passed banning the practice. The crackdown on software piracy was not evenly spread throughout Europe, however. Countries like the Netherlands, Greece, Finland, Sweden, and Norway didn’t have strict software piracy laws, if they had any at all, which allowed the warez scene to flourish there.

This is the hypothesis I've come to believe. Demoscene has always been tightly coupled with warez. In the United States, release groups had to go deep underground much sooner than their euro counterparts for operational security reasons.

If you were the feds back then, one of the ways to hunt a release group was to find its cracktro/demo authors who tended to operate a little more openly due to the larger demoscene. The release cells in scene groups would then cut ties with their own demo people for this very reason. Demo authors would then feel a lot less cool because they weren't as connected to the release elements of their own group anymore.

As of about 20 years ago, release elements of euro groups began operating under equally strict security regimens. I think in large part it came down to the fact their demoscene had more time to grow roots and flourish than the American scene.