First, I should say that I'm presently a steward on the Eclipse project, so I must believe there's something to this open source thing, at least for my own particular context.
Conrad D'Cruz said: > No I don't thing open source is driving down the value of > tech professionals. On the contrary, I think open source > gives people the opportunity to get very valuable experience > in the areas of their choice. These are two different topics. But anyway, I agree that the opportunity to acquire technology for free for the purpose of learning is a very clear benefit. As to the first point, it is often the case that when you give something away for free you build an expectation in the market that it will always be free. The exception is where you build up a dependency, and then start charging. Drugs come to mind, "your first hit is free but the next one we charge for". Since this is not likely to happen with software there is a possibility that over time as more software becomes free or very inexpensive it may drive the overall price of software down, as well as the price of people who make software, which the exception of certan specialty software. However, there are alternative models: Andrew Oliver said: > I founded a small company on the basis of my work in open source... > Jboss... Andrew pointed out several valid business models built on selling services for software that is provided for free. The cautionary note here is that not all free software lends itself to selling services, and not all users of software, free or otherwise, are inclined to augment that software with services. I personally have been the beneficiary of quite a bit of free software, yet I have not yet spent a dime on services. I think this is the more common model. On the other hand a company may do a better job capturing a market with free software than they would by charging for it, and the proportion of users who are willing to pay for services provides enough revenue to make the whole endeavor worthwhile. The other cautionary note is that when you provide software without charge you benefit members of a market who might otherwise have paid you or your employer to do the same thing. There may be other indirect benefits and it is important to have those clearly identified before spending your own finite and valuable resources. Andrew Oliver said: > I think open source threatens your stuff (testing tools) Only if my company continues to ignore changes in the economic model created by open source. For example, open source has given us the opportunity to teach people how to use open source testing tools (http://www.silvermark.com/Services/training/agile_testing.html), without having to invest anything in actually writing those tools. The more tools emerge the more we have to teach about. Andrew Oliver said: > So no, I don't think open source is responsible for "offshoring". That's not really what I was saying. My point was that when from an economic perspective if you are competing with workers who you are also giving free software to, or answering questions about that or other software without charge, you many be spending your own finite resource (time) increasing their ability to compete with you, possibly without receiving any equivalent benefit in return. If you find a way to sell those people services or are able to be paid by a company that does, or somehow receive some other indirect benefit then everything works out. If not you should reconsider the arrangement. In the case of JUnit I was pointing out an observation I made from following that group for the last few years, that a particularly large number of questions come from people working in countries that are doing outsource work and that the software, as well as the answers to questions about the software, are being provided by people in countries that have underemployed workers who are competing with them. Hopefully that observation is taken out of context and that it all works out well for everybody in the end. Conrad D'Cruz said: > I think there are many problem in the IS/IT field that > pre-date the dot com boom and bust!! It is a lot more > involved and we cannot pin the "blame" on any one thing!! I don't think I was trying to say that. Economics is a vastly complex field and it’s a good day when you can even get two economists to agree. If you were to try to build a mathematical model of the world economy the number of variables, if you could even identify them all, would be staggering. I posed these questions as points to consider and also to suggest that free software has changed the equation to the benefit of many and possibly the detriment of some. Each of us has our own context within the world economy. It behooves us all to understand what that context is and whether participating in open source projects on balance benefits us as individuals, specifically when contributing on a volunteer basis with no clear promise or path to compensation. ----------------------------- Mike Silverstein SilverMark, Inc. The Object Testing Company www.silvermark.com --- Outgoing mail is certified Virus Free. Checked by AVG anti-virus system (http://www.grisoft.com). Version: 6.0.576 / Virus Database: 365 - Release Date: 1/30/2004 _______________________________________________ Juglist mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://trijug.org/mailman/listinfo/juglist_trijug.org
