Yup. If you want to do interesting work / really write software then you have to give it away for free. If you want to get paid you have to spend your days cobbling together open source to accomplish totally trivial functionality that some dimwit has “invented”. That’s the situation we’ve gotten ourselves into, unfortunately.
You have to deliver value to your customers/users. If doing hard engineering delivers value then you will get paid for it. If plumbing together open source components delivers value then you will get paid for that.
Users don’t care how your product works, they just care that it improves their life.
Sure. But do you see a lot of lawyers uploading their agreement templates on github? Value (or actually price) is a function of supply and demand, and when there’s almost infinite supply at a zero price point value/price goes to zero. That’s what has happened.
Yep, the geeks were duped. It reminds me of a documentary from about 20 years ago where Eric Raymond is boasting to some Microsoft Exec that open source was their worst nightmare. Yeah open source sure showed them, by providing lord only knows how much of the Azure infrastructure for free.
> by providing lord only knows how much of the Azure infrastructure for free.
They learned how to play the game. Absolutely no other trade out there makes their work available for free to the extent software engineers do. Essentially software engineers put themselves in a position where they _depend_ on salaried employment, working for those that leverage their free work to generate billions in revenue. Sure there are contractors out there but by and large software engineering is salaried work. The naive thinking is that by making software available for free somehow they change the world for the better. Instead they willingly provide free work to corporations that then abuse them.
Sure. If you’re looking for “a job” then this situation is great (and there’s nothing wrong with that BTW). But for those of us who like to read Donald Knuth it’s been the road to serfdom.
You may believe or not, but large businesses and even some medium, uses strategy of destroy low segments of market with products sell much lower than market prices or even free.
Simple example, HDDs of small sizes and very large, usually sell cheaper than cost production, donated from profitable medium segment, or from other source of cheap money (like VC or stocks).
Hard example, when IBM released Eclipse, killed lot of small companies, who made simple cheap IDEs (shareware). Those small companies usually are not threat, but sometimes could grow.
You throw this out there like some fact.
Meanwhile, the lot of us make money on web dev that is built upon open source. The same we have been doing for a long time now.