As a coder the tsunami of FOSS is a negative. My job is now to glue free modules together rather than design stuff. I'd be quite happy to pay for a compiler if I had to.
As a home tinkerer I do agree with you. And glad Haskell and Linux are available for free.
As a programmer that can work with FOSS software, you have now much more employment options because frameworks/etc. are not proprietary to the company you work for, and you easily transfer your knowledge to another company. If your job is "now to glue free modules together" you are also most likely responsible for a bigger part of the product due to FOSS, which could give you a better position in salary negotiations.
FOSS also gives (not just, but more so than others) developers better non-employment options. As a freelancer, you can more or less choose your software stack and then go hunting for clients, without having to worry about licencing fees limiting your client base. As a founder, you can much more cheaply found a tech-company, because there is much smaller upfront investment necessary, and when started as a side-project can be as cheap as renting a server.
Honestly, I disagree with your statement. The tsunami of FOSS is sometimes an advantage as well, because people can easily migrate off of legacy architecture that they were hired to fix in the first place and pick one to our liking. Since I do not know your niche or how much experience you have, it's hard for me to guess whether you have worked as a contractor somewhere, but...
I had a guy re-inventing his own Celery with a single worker in the same thread as main process. Of course it failed spectacularly :) I then also had an example of someone deliberately not using already battle-tested auth libraries for social auth but creating his own and of course he managed to expose things that were not needed to the client app and the company got hacked. He spent a month building it, instead of just plugging in an already built library that is used in production by millions of people.
Another developer yet built his own framework which was never stable and costed the company tens of thousands of dollars for the three months it was in production (plus three for development).
These are not some small start-ups or dev-shops, but rather serious companies that had devs that were alumni of Big 4. I think I am not the only one with this experience.
For me that is heresy - similar to not using a great standard library in a any language, but rather building your own libs/wrappers. Now, I have nothing against modifying a library or optimizing it for your use case, however starting things from scratch is in my opinion a huge cost, unless your company has time and money to throw.
If you feel it's better without those things, good on you. But I'm sure you'll find it harder to get help for a project than you would with open source, spend far longer on every project than you would by merely using an existing framework or end up at the whims at a large corporation with no interest in letting you make your own modifications to the code.
If you're employed, why would you care? You're getting paid the same, the extra time is your employer's problem.
And I still stand by the 'easier to get help with' part. Unless you're the sole web developer or software engineer on a product, you're going to have to get someone else involved further down the line. If you use an existing piece of software, that's easy. Hire someone with experience in it, and they'll probably figure out what to do.
If it's bespoke, you'll need to either train them yourself to work on the software (and do the same every time someone new comes in), or hope they can figure out what your code is doing without any assistance. This will then take more time and effort every time someone gets hired.
Right, but if there was no OSS to use, it would be as quickly as possible.
And I still stand by the 'easier to get help with' part.
Right, but again, that extra time and effort is still the employer's problem.