Merritt, Eric said: > The vast majority of work for programmers in this country is > custom inhouse' development for mid-large companies. These > are the types of applications that don't exist in the open > source world. Also the type of applications that companies > use from open source tend to be operating systems > (linux/bsd), office tools (open office) and the like. How > many programmers could resonable be employed in these types > of endeavors? 5,000 - 10,000? Thats a small percentage of the > total number of programmers nationwide. I don't think that > programmers providing thier work under an open source license > has anything to do with the devaluation of programmers. I > think that, generally, the availablity or people with good > progaming skills for a tenth or less of what a programmer > generally makes in the us is what is devaluing programmers. I > hate to see this happen, but its inevitable. Globalization is > a good thing in the long run, but short term it hurts > specific industries. Right now the industry its hurting us' > the us and european IT industry. Pointing to OSS as the > source of the industries problems is a failure to look at the > wider picture.
I think OSS is simply one term in a larger economic equation. I don't think any reasonable person could point to any one thing as the cause of large scale economic change, short of some global catastrophe. The effect of hours contributed to OSS projects may be greater than you think. Consider this small, overly simplified example: To use your example of in-house projects, in the past companies creating software for these projects faced 'build' vs. buy' decisions, usually doing a little of both. The set of options has now expanded to include 'download for free'. If you contribute an hour to an OSS framework and that framework is adopted within 1000 projects that would otherwise have made a 'build' decision, you have effectively reduced the demand for labor by 1000 hours. Alternatively, consider the possibility that some companies would have made 'buy' decisions but were influenced to go the 'download' route by the availability of free software. If enough of that happens some vendors may respond by orienting themselves more toward services, in some cases letting some of their product developers go. These developers enter the labor marketplace, possibly competing against the people who contributed the software. Labor supply goes up, demand and rates go down. These developers start contributing to OSS projects in order to gain experience and get their names out and the cycle continues, or actually reinforces itself through feedback. Or perhaps in some cases companies in foreign countries make 'download' instead of 'buy' decisions so fewer dollars flow back into this country. The bottom line is that I'm having difficulty coming up with an economic framework in which giving away one's time to free software projects is a net positive factor in overall job growth. Note that this is quite different from companies' paying developers to write software that is then given away for free, like Java, Eclipse, etc. which a somewhat different topic. ----------------------------- 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
