Comment Programmer A and Programmer B (Score 1) 436
It's not about Company A and Company B. It's about Programmer A and Programmer B.
Last year at OSCON there was an Open Source Business Summit. On one of the days they had a panel talking about business models. They had some CEO's and financial analysts talking shop (see the conference notes if you want more info). Basically, they all agreed that there was no viable Open Source Business Model.
They were wrong, because they asked the wrong question. The question they were implicitly asking was "Is there a SCALABLE Open Source Business Model?", where scalable ~= per-seat licensing. The answer to that question is no, with the exception of companies with established VAR networks and great marketing (ala Red Hat and IBM).
One of the audience members mentioned that his company's (~300 employees) core business was supporting open-source software, and they made profits and were a viable business. He was not given much attention by the people at the front of the room because that kind of business (which scales per person) is not a fundable, IPO-able, easy exit-strategy business which financial people are interested in.
Proprietary software benefits the company that produces it. Open Source software benefits the programmer. Example:
Name some famous programmers. How many of them code proprietary software?
Name some people you know from Microsoft. How many of them are programmers?
So what does that mean for the software industry?
Let me illustrate by analogy. Who creates Law and who profits from Law? Take a law firm as an example. A law firm is a partnership, where the members of the firm must be certified by a state board. The firm recruits new members based on the perceived expertise of the potential member. The business is built on trust, repeatable business, customer satisfaction, and expertise.
Is there any part of the Law which lawyers cannot access because of restrictive policy? Is there any part of the Law which lawyers cannot attempt to modify or argue in a court of law? Once a change has been commited, it becomes a part of the greater body of law until some better law has been determined.
No one company controls the law. No courtroom technique can be patented. No licensing fees are required for legal precedents.
Next question: do lawyers make money?
Back to the software industry. In the future, Software Engineers will be compensated in a manner which directly reflects their level of expertise. There will probably be certification required at the state level, like any other legitimate engineering discipline. Groups of skilled programmers and administrators will form partnerships, and distribution of earnings within the partnership will take place in a fair and transparent manner.
The successful partnerships will be successful (and make much money) because high levels of customer satisfaction will lead to repeat business. Customers will be satisfied because their IT will just work, and when it doesn't, or they need a new feature added, they will contact the IT firm and have the work done on a time and materials basis (with little transaction cost).
Now, that leaves one issue: What about the companies that invest huge amounts of time, money, and resources to develop a software product? Well, those companies will become very rare, as most software will be developed on the basis of incremental improvement (aka standing of the shoulders of giants). The Linux kernel is the best example of this, but we can see this form of development spreading to all ends of the software industry. As software becomes more modularized, interfaces open and standardized, and development tools improve, more and more software can be built by making modifications to existing software or using readily available libraries.
That's my $0.03
Last year at OSCON there was an Open Source Business Summit. On one of the days they had a panel talking about business models. They had some CEO's and financial analysts talking shop (see the conference notes if you want more info). Basically, they all agreed that there was no viable Open Source Business Model.
They were wrong, because they asked the wrong question. The question they were implicitly asking was "Is there a SCALABLE Open Source Business Model?", where scalable ~= per-seat licensing. The answer to that question is no, with the exception of companies with established VAR networks and great marketing (ala Red Hat and IBM).
One of the audience members mentioned that his company's (~300 employees) core business was supporting open-source software, and they made profits and were a viable business. He was not given much attention by the people at the front of the room because that kind of business (which scales per person) is not a fundable, IPO-able, easy exit-strategy business which financial people are interested in.
Proprietary software benefits the company that produces it. Open Source software benefits the programmer. Example:
Name some famous programmers. How many of them code proprietary software?
Name some people you know from Microsoft. How many of them are programmers?
So what does that mean for the software industry?
Let me illustrate by analogy. Who creates Law and who profits from Law? Take a law firm as an example. A law firm is a partnership, where the members of the firm must be certified by a state board. The firm recruits new members based on the perceived expertise of the potential member. The business is built on trust, repeatable business, customer satisfaction, and expertise.
Is there any part of the Law which lawyers cannot access because of restrictive policy? Is there any part of the Law which lawyers cannot attempt to modify or argue in a court of law? Once a change has been commited, it becomes a part of the greater body of law until some better law has been determined.
No one company controls the law. No courtroom technique can be patented. No licensing fees are required for legal precedents.
Next question: do lawyers make money?
Back to the software industry. In the future, Software Engineers will be compensated in a manner which directly reflects their level of expertise. There will probably be certification required at the state level, like any other legitimate engineering discipline. Groups of skilled programmers and administrators will form partnerships, and distribution of earnings within the partnership will take place in a fair and transparent manner.
The successful partnerships will be successful (and make much money) because high levels of customer satisfaction will lead to repeat business. Customers will be satisfied because their IT will just work, and when it doesn't, or they need a new feature added, they will contact the IT firm and have the work done on a time and materials basis (with little transaction cost).
Now, that leaves one issue: What about the companies that invest huge amounts of time, money, and resources to develop a software product? Well, those companies will become very rare, as most software will be developed on the basis of incremental improvement (aka standing of the shoulders of giants). The Linux kernel is the best example of this, but we can see this form of development spreading to all ends of the software industry. As software becomes more modularized, interfaces open and standardized, and development tools improve, more and more software can be built by making modifications to existing software or using readily available libraries.
That's my $0.03
