See you on the unemployment line Homie. This may sound a little self-serving, but I write software for a living, I have for about 9 years now. In a 2002 IT Industry Census there were 499,000 Computer Programmers and 394,000 Computer Software Engineers. By the definitions of the census those are the developers and the engineers that design the software itself. I fall into the second category myself. So that’s roughly 900,000 jobs in 2002 in the industry of creating computer software. The average salary seemed to be about $50,000 US.
Now I have worked hard to hone my skill and am quite proud of the position I have attained and live quite comfortably on the salary I receive for my work. But now that we are in 2019, and open source software has vanquished the likes of Microsoft (my employer), Adobe, Autodesk, Oracle, Apple and their contemporaries, I find myself out of a job. Why is that you ask? Well the nature of open-source software, is that it is distributed with all of it’s un-compiled source code, clean and pretty and in it’s existence nullifying any shred of intellectual property the individuals who wrote it could have possibly hoped to maintain.
Now, I know that open-source software doesn’t always mean the crowd-source, written by Joe average developer and thrown into the wild with no guarantee. Sometimes there are corporations that develop software, release it open source, and still make some money. Usually those companies (like IBM and Sun) are making their money with hardware and aren’t true “software” companies. So ruling those out, we now find a company like my employer with absolutely zero incentive to spend the billions of dollars it spends on research and development so it can be copied (reverse-engineered is over stating it when you can look at the damned code) by anyone who wants to.
There is a humble reality that open-source software today has yet to accept as truth. 90% of open-source software applications are direct copies of some closed-source proprietary software. The problem with open-source software when all of the proprietary software companies die, is that they have nothing to copy from and will be our only provider of innovation. The billions of dollars that major software companies spend on things like research and development, training, focus testing, market research…. Not to mention the quiet agreements that allow them to start working on hardware that has not been released yet so they can have products ready when the new hardware ships…is gone.
The 900,000 paid developers dwindle down to a fraction, and the vendors that supply training and documentation for development dry up. Let’s face it, without large corporations with huge budgets, they don’t sell enough copies of their books to stay in business.
So now, I still love to write software, but I do it in my spare time because I no longer get paid for it. I work my day job as a Geek Squad member at Best Buy and develop at night for free.
It’s now 2022 and the situation is getting really strange. Just like Linux, we now have 50 different flavors of productivity suites, the are all nearly exactly alike, but are just incompatible enough to where it’s hard to figure out what will read what. You thought deciding to develop for Mac or Windows was bad? Now you have to decide if you are developing for Red-Hat or Debian, or is it Solaris, are they using KDE or Gnome? Oh, and since nobody is writing software to push users to new hardware, you also have to make sure that your software will work on a 10 year old PC.
I know this is a sarcastic, bleak and exaggerated scenario, but I think that the open-source community really fails to see the service and value that proprietary software fills. I know that you can argue that the millions of users across the net will provide all of the feedback you could want but let’s be honest. Even though all of those users cover a large spectrum of hardware configurations, will they be diligent in testing? Will they file all the bugs they find? Those are big ifs on mission critical software.
I work on software that deals with sensitive financial information. Are the world’s largest corporations going to trust their information to software that was written by anyone and everyone? Is the government going to have to spin up compliancy code reviewers to make sure that Sarbanes-Oxley rules are met?
There are many questions and there are perhaps answers that will satisfy many people, but I for one am not really that concerned.
I think open-source software has made incredible inroads to the server world and I have no reason to second guess the usage of the Linux operating system or server applications like Apache or Tomcat. The alternative is my desktop and millions of desktops across the world. I am a pretty savvy user with a good bit of experience with Linux in it’s many flavors. I would never in a million years choose Gimp of Photoshop, OpenOffice over Microsoft Office or Amarok over iTunes. The music and video production tools are just shadows of much previous versions of Final Cut or ProTools, and let’s face it, Electronic Arts, Bungie and Ubisoft are in no hurry to spin up new teams to port their games to Linux. I wouldn’t either knowing that I have to release the code along with it and the community is going to spin off a hundred variants that take away from their bottom line.
I don’t think I’ll ever understand the logic. Why is it that there is this contingent of people who think that companies don’t have the right to intellectual property, or to charge for their time and resources? Why is it that so many think that companies that create closed source software have some evil motive that drives them to keep secrets.
But it’s only software for some reason. Nobody faults GM for trade secrets. Nobody is upset at KFC for hanging on to their secret recipe. I have never heard anyone cry out in shock and rage at Google for keeping their page ranking formula proprietary (except the SEO experts that want to cheat it of course)
The point is, Capitalism fails when nobody has incentive and competition is leveled to an even playing field. As far as I know America is still based on capitalism and I for one am in favor of free competition.
What are your thoughts on the debate? I am sure I will get tons of Linux fanboy hate, but it’s a big deal. I am just pretty content knowing that the desktop is safe. Open-source software has a long way to go and no gas to make the trip.
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Ok, I’ll bite.
I agree with you that proprietary software serves a purpose. I just disagree with your long term outlook. I know you exaggerated to show your point but I think you made some flawed assumptions. One major one is that everything will go open source.
Businesses in all lines of work have investment and equity in their business processes. They may do things a little better, quicker or with less steps. They will be willing to pay developers to make changes, customize, enhance and maintain their systems. There will even be completely new ideas that require complete development from scratch.
Where open source excels is in the commodity. Something thousands of people will use. Operating systems have been out for how long? How much innovation is really in each version of Windows/Mac/Linux? For 6 years and the budget I expected more than Vista. I realize that the effort and money that goes into this industry is huge and I don’t mean to trivialize it, I am a developer too. How much code was thrown away? How many developers were taken off creating features to fix bugs in old code that was already replaced?
Open source will take over the commodity products; the OS, productivity software, browser, etc. This will free up companies like your employer to direct their efforts at the other markets, ones that are new and innovative. Why spend millions on a new file system when there are dozens out there that do what you want (or will with slight enhancements)?
There may be a problem with with slight differences in versions of open source but that is what standards are for. Just because there open source software doesn’t mean that there won’t be standards. My experience has been that open source follows standards better than companies with 90% market share (unfortunately even small mistakes they make show up huge).
All of this is of course dependent on open source getting to the point where commodity software is no longer profitable, still a long way off. Not having the foresight to see that it is just that, a commodity, could have a disastrous impact to some of these companies, but most will adapt, innovate, and continue to employ developers and engineers.
Great post, I’m just surprised at the lack of hate responses so far =P
I get annoyed as well listening to the usual open source tirade about the evils of proprietary code (written largely I’m sure by 14 year old school kids who just don’t want to pay for things)
I was once like that as well, always looking for the freeware and never wanting to pay for software. Eventually though I got sick of spending hours looking for the half-finished open source project which would kind of sort of get done done what I wanted. Now I just pay the 20 bucks and have software which just does what i need…
Anyone who thinks OO is a serious alternative to MS Office obviously doesn’t use Office becuase I used OO for months and eventually got so sick of it I gave up.
Perhaps the biggest thing the open source community has to learn is that sprouting ideological rubbish will achieve little, and this is something I really respect Mark Shuttleworth (founder of Ubuntu) for.
His stance is that he wouldn’t suggest anyone move to Linux over Windows. If the open source philosophy really does work than they WILL create a great product and people WILL use it… unlike now when we are told repeatedly why we should be using Linux instead of Windows.