I look at open source as the market correcting itself. Pressure had been building for years for bugs out there to be able to be fixed. Now, if you want to try to fix a bug in a product that you use, if it is open source, you can. Are you tired of being charged an arm and a leg for regular software that everyone needs or being forced to pay for upgrades that don't really have any new features that you can use (and be legal)? Well, the companies didn't do a good job of it in the past according to a lot of users, so open source is the answer that they are using. It may be always be a little behind proprietary software, but at least you won't fall all the way back into the stone ages if you don't want to be forced to pay for the latest thing.

One advantage of open source for programmers in my view is that they don't have to deal with the pressure and deadlines of releasing a few of these products as their lively hood. Tired of that manager who tries to squeeze you for productivity at the cost of clean code? Do you feel good about the quality of software your company produces at the end of the day? Without open source I think that companies would have been trying to reduce programmer salaries anyway, and you would be forced to give away your good code almost for free.

Just because we have open source, it does not mean that all programmers will be out of a job. People still have ideas for software every day and not everyone has the ability to build that software. I do think we need to make sure that open source developers continue to get paid.