For me, open source is a legal necessity. Reading Jon Bentley's Programming Pearls [collections of articles in Byte I think from the 80s], he made a point that good programmers are ones who, over the years, aquire a toolkit of scripts and libraries which enable them to be far better coders than the person next to them without said wealth of tools.
I decided I wanted to do that, but in the 90/00s every company claims ownership on my tools when I switch companies. By forcing me to sign NDAs etc, I was forced to be have to able to open source my work to ethically use my tools and libraries at each new company. Pushing what I can of it to Apache, or to osjava.org [which I don't own], allows me to feel I'm on slightly stronger grounds legally. I can now fight NDAs somewhat to allow me to take tools to the next place. I didn't get in on the boom, but for all the open source work over the last 3 years, I think I've probably made a few thousand from articles and draft-book reviewing. To answer your two statements: 1: Diminished value of the developer. Sounds very reasonable, and seems all the more reason to get in on the arms race. The open source developer is not diminished in value, as Andrew's interview experience shows, just the developers who go home at 5pm and stop thinking about coding. Not every non-open-source developer is a strict 8->5 coder, but it's a lot easier for an open-source developer to show results for 5->8 coding. Before I got into open-source, I would go home and do something for work, either for free or I would attempt to get paid overtime for it. Now I do open-source and basically do 2 jobs. Happiness is when the open-source thing helps work and I can appear to do 2 jobs in the time of 1, be it at home or work :) 2: Unemployed open-sourcers supporting employed out-sources While there may be some shreds to this, most open sourcers are employed I think. Hopefully it's a catch-22. Unemployment for an active open source coder means a period of time in which they can do lots of open source work, which will probably start nudging them back into a job. Depression, desperation could cause problems here, though the biggest threat is having to desperately accept the first job with NDA terms that block open source work. I live in fear of this :) In terms of the US, I think it's still a net-benefactor of open-source due to the large amount of finnish, german, french, australian and british open source work it hasn't had to pay as much for [linux, samba, kde, lots of others], but this is a very hard equation to work the numbers out for. I tend to think that as corporate jobs are the ones that are mainly out-sourced, and as corporate jobs are the least likely to create or use open-source, we've not yet reached the point where your suggestion is valid. I define a 'corporate' as someone who works for a big company whose chief raison d'etre is not computers. GE, Humana, Ford are local ones for me in Kentucky [yeah I know, but we lack enough Java to have a viable JUG so I roam]. Hen On Sat, 28 Feb 2004, Andrew Oliver wrote: > I think open source threatens your stuff (testing tools), but ultimately I > make more money doing open source than I made during the boom. I don't > > > From: "Michael Silverstein" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > > Reply-To: "Research Triangle Java User's Group mailing > > list."<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > > Date: Sat, 28 Feb 2004 07:46:40 -0500 > > To: "'Research Triangle Java User's Group mailing list.'" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > > Subject: RE: [Juglist] Why is volunteering for open source a bad thing? (was > > TechEngage III) > > > > 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. _______________________________________________ Juglist mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://trijug.org/mailman/listinfo/juglist_trijug.org
