Henri Yandell wrote: 
> I was going to make the same point. Why is volunteering for 
> open source a bad thing?

Here's a couple of politically incorrect things to think about:

1) Conrad D'Cruz made the comment that the value of tech professionals
has diminished recently. Could the fact that software developers are
giving their services away for free through open source projects have
anything to do with that? Could it be that software developers have
devalued themselves by giving away their two most precious assets: time
and ingenuity? 

2) How many out of work tech professionals are providing free open
source tools and support to companies that would otherwise be paying
them. How many are providing tools and services to people in other
countries who are doing outsourced work? For an example, go to the JUnit
group ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) and look at the nationalities of people
asking questions vs. that of the people answering them.

I think open source has a lot of benefit at the corporate and
macroeconomic level but for individual participants there may be a few
downsides along with the benefits. I think these are two that might be
worth considering.

-----------------------------
Mike Silverstein
SilverMark, Inc.
The Object Testing Company
www.silvermark.com

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