Comment Re:Here is my analysis of open source... (Score 1) 511
Pretty cynical...
I am not Adam Smith, but I do have some background in economics: I doubt this fragile equilibrium will last long.
Is there an infinite supply of "key players" or "players" and people endorsing other roles ? Really ? What is the real value of the "payload" ? Is it enough to re-pay the loss of revenue for the key developpers ? Why would a good engineer work on a long period of time for a low salary ? People grow up, will have children to feed, etc.
Is it fair to see people take part of your work, make a profit and not give you anything back in return ? and bug you for extra features, and take you away from your code to support their own problems, for free !?
The real problem, is that the less people write Open Source code and get paid for that or the more people take money away from the developpers by reselling dubious services without improving the software, then the system will fail.
There needs to be a _real_ incentive for people to write code, be it Open Source or proprietary.
Writing good software is difficult. Software does cost money. And it's better for the industry to invest in good software development than to pay again and again to have some custom, un-reusable glue slapped over again on bad software.
In fact, there needs to be more companies like IBM or Sun or Novell, etc., paying a lot of money to pay Open Source developpers.
I am not Adam Smith, but I do have some background in economics: I doubt this fragile equilibrium will last long.
Is there an infinite supply of "key players" or "players" and people endorsing other roles ? Really ? What is the real value of the "payload" ? Is it enough to re-pay the loss of revenue for the key developpers ? Why would a good engineer work on a long period of time for a low salary ? People grow up, will have children to feed, etc.
Is it fair to see people take part of your work, make a profit and not give you anything back in return ? and bug you for extra features, and take you away from your code to support their own problems, for free !?
The real problem, is that the less people write Open Source code and get paid for that or the more people take money away from the developpers by reselling dubious services without improving the software, then the system will fail.
There needs to be a _real_ incentive for people to write code, be it Open Source or proprietary.
Writing good software is difficult. Software does cost money. And it's better for the industry to invest in good software development than to pay again and again to have some custom, un-reusable glue slapped over again on bad software.
In fact, there needs to be more companies like IBM or Sun or Novell, etc., paying a lot of money to pay Open Source developpers.
