Comment Respect is not our primary reward. (Score 2) 187
Getting the job done and getting paid is a good enough reward. The question is how to achieve it. Here's a suggestion:
For the time being, let's divide programmers in two groups:
- The Rock&Roll stars
- The dentists
The Rock&Roll stars want to create a hit and strike gold. If they don't make it, they stay unknown and poor. If they do, their wealth increases by orders of magnitude.
The dentists just do their job, day after day. However good a job they did for one customer, they still have to start from scratch in the next one's mouth. Of course, as they go along, they gather experience and may be able to process more clients in one day, but not by orders of magnitude.
I'd say the Rock&Roll star depends on the existence of closed software to work.
And the dentist could do very well in an open software paradigm.
It depends what is the profile of most programmers: a teenage wonder kid with no responsibilities or a skilled adult in a particular trade.
I have been creating open source software for customers for the last fifteen years and in all that time, not one of my customers ever tried to understand my source code, let alone try to learn how to code himself.
They pay me by the hour to be able to focus on their own job instead of trying to learn of to make the damn thing work.
So, on one side, you have end users and on the other, you have technicians.
One side pays the other to spend time solving problems. That's pretty much in line with the idea of capitalism. And it takes care of feeding the programmers.
Now forget the end user one moment and focus on the programmers.
To do their work, they need software tools. They have a choice between paying for a closed tool kit or an open one.
In my opinion, it is very easy to demonstrate that it makes much more economic sense for each individual programmer to share the tools than to sell it to each other.
For each hour you put in maintaining the common software pool, you get many orders of magnitude more code back.
While when you spend one hour's worth of salary on a closed source software tool, you get a few dollars worth of software and that's it.
So what I'm saying is that the economic model under which Open Source software makes economic sense is one where most programmers are not confined within the glass walls of an ivory tower, but are supported by a network of paying customers.
This may help bridge the gap between programmers who give away their work of love for the benefit of mankind and the volunters who also give away their time for the benefit of mankind in non-profit organisations (generally working in a Windows environment).
For the time being, let's divide programmers in two groups:
- The Rock&Roll stars
- The dentists
The Rock&Roll stars want to create a hit and strike gold. If they don't make it, they stay unknown and poor. If they do, their wealth increases by orders of magnitude.
The dentists just do their job, day after day. However good a job they did for one customer, they still have to start from scratch in the next one's mouth. Of course, as they go along, they gather experience and may be able to process more clients in one day, but not by orders of magnitude.
I'd say the Rock&Roll star depends on the existence of closed software to work.
And the dentist could do very well in an open software paradigm.
It depends what is the profile of most programmers: a teenage wonder kid with no responsibilities or a skilled adult in a particular trade.
I have been creating open source software for customers for the last fifteen years and in all that time, not one of my customers ever tried to understand my source code, let alone try to learn how to code himself.
They pay me by the hour to be able to focus on their own job instead of trying to learn of to make the damn thing work.
So, on one side, you have end users and on the other, you have technicians.
One side pays the other to spend time solving problems. That's pretty much in line with the idea of capitalism. And it takes care of feeding the programmers.
Now forget the end user one moment and focus on the programmers.
To do their work, they need software tools. They have a choice between paying for a closed tool kit or an open one.
In my opinion, it is very easy to demonstrate that it makes much more economic sense for each individual programmer to share the tools than to sell it to each other.
For each hour you put in maintaining the common software pool, you get many orders of magnitude more code back.
While when you spend one hour's worth of salary on a closed source software tool, you get a few dollars worth of software and that's it.
So what I'm saying is that the economic model under which Open Source software makes economic sense is one where most programmers are not confined within the glass walls of an ivory tower, but are supported by a network of paying customers.
This may help bridge the gap between programmers who give away their work of love for the benefit of mankind and the volunters who also give away their time for the benefit of mankind in non-profit organisations (generally working in a Windows environment).
