"The xenophobic uncle has seen more than you and may well be the wiser man. Sometimes the country on the other side of the border is the enemy."
Open source has also cut many jobs and devalued salaries, but many don't see it this way. As businesses get more tech savvy (which is happening fairly quickly), they realize that they don't have to pay software engineers to build software any longer. They can take open source, which many engineers and good developers toiled away on for years, and pay what I call a 'software mechanic' considerably less money (and they don't need nearly as much experience) to add features to it. It makes outsourcing very easy and a realistic option.
I predicted this 10 years ago when everyone said free software was the future and Stallman somehow thought that all developers would become government workers (his dream was to have all software "free" and have the government pay developers salaries for the good of everyone).
I just don't understand why people in the tech community try so hard to give all of their leverage away to big companies.
> Open source has also cut many jobs and devalued salaries
The flip side is that open source fueled the web explosion.
Example: you don't need a multi-million dollar IT team to have a storefront, because you don't have to hand-build a framework. How many people here are making over $100k/yr doing computer stuff for a business that wouldn't have dreamed of hiring someone to do computer stuff twenty years ago?
Without open source, we'd probably just have a small priesthood building WebObjects front-ends to mainframes, and only Fortune 500 companies would be able to afford a web presence.
> Open source has also cut many jobs and devalued salaries,
[citation needed]
Obviously, choosing an open source model limits the opportunities for monetizing software development through licensing fees. I don't see the evidence that it has actually, in fact, "cut many jobs and devalued salaries", however.
> As businesses get more tech savvy (which is happening fairly quickly), they realize that they don't have to pay software engineers to build software any longer.
Non-software business avoided doing that directly even before open source was particularly popular, by paying other people for COTS software licenses, support, professional services, custom development, etc. Having worked in an enterprise firm at the time, while we had large license fees, the hammer to get people to pay them wasn't that "if you don't pay, we'll sue you for copyright infringement for using the software without a valid license", it was "if you don't pay, you lose the support that's bundled as part of your license agreement".
Support, professional services, custom development that's different features desired by the general market, etc., is what most business pay for with software, no matter what the licensing model is. Open source doesn't affect that at all. And the people that can be most effective at selling that, even with open source software, are the people who are actually deeply involved in developing the software. Which is why, even with open source software, the firms that make their revenue selling support to enterprises are still paying core developers on the project -- so, in effect, the end users are still paying for the development of the software, just like they always did. (Of course, open source means that the companies that want to can just get the source and provide their own support -- but many of the big users doing that, it turns out, also and up paying their own employees to work as core developers on the upstream project.)
Open source has also cut many jobs and devalued salaries, but many don't see it this way. As businesses get more tech savvy (which is happening fairly quickly), they realize that they don't have to pay software engineers to build software any longer. They can take open source, which many engineers and good developers toiled away on for years, and pay what I call a 'software mechanic' considerably less money (and they don't need nearly as much experience) to add features to it. It makes outsourcing very easy and a realistic option.
I predicted this 10 years ago when everyone said free software was the future and Stallman somehow thought that all developers would become government workers (his dream was to have all software "free" and have the government pay developers salaries for the good of everyone).
I just don't understand why people in the tech community try so hard to give all of their leverage away to big companies.