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that is absolutely ridiculous, people are giving their spare time to do something they enjoy and help others, and that annoys you?

and the quality argument is also ridiculous, the internet runs on open source software, this forum is on open source software (possibly a bad example), along with pretty much every single site you use.

and as for all these "multiple platform", open source desktop applications are typically build, unsurprisingly, on an open source platform, i think youll find if you ran a linux variant you could contribute to 90% of all open source project without having to switch.

and as for "devalues" your work, the market decides what your work is worth, not you, if your ability to make money is crippled by what people do in their spare time, I would suggest rethinking how you are going about things

I'm confused...aren't there quite a few counter examples to your claims? Things like Linux, Apache, MySQL, PostgreSQL, PHP, Python, Perl, Ruby, Firefox, etc, etc?

I'd feel better about your rant if you weren't a) biased against the idea and ethos of FOSS, and b) selling something.

Many of those projects were started by college students. Linux was a fork of another flavor of unix started by Linus Torvalds when he was a masters student. Apache started as a proof of concept during the early days of the internet and morphed into what it is. IIS is better. The only reason Apache has more installs than IIS is because Linux is free.

MySQL is not as good as either MS SQL Server or Oracle and you can pay for MySQL Support from the company that produces it. PostgreSQL was also started at a university by professors getting paid to eat and buy clothes.

PHP doesn't hold a Candle to either .NET or Java, which you should have listed if you wanted to really try to convince me I'm wrong. Java is pretty good, but is commercially funded and those programmers get to eat. There's a lot of fanboyism around PHP and I'm not one of those.

Perl is awesome. It was created by a programmer at a publicly funded organization - NASA. It should be open source and he also got to eat while writing it.

Ruby is a great language if you know how to "drop down into C."

Firefox is commercially supported by Google search results. They make millions of dollars a year and honestly, it should be way higher quality than it is considering the budget they have to work with. Opera kicks firefox's butt all over the place. Firefox is good, don't get me wrong, but it doesn't change my mind.

The examples you give are a tiny fraction of the open source environment and most of them do not contradict what I have said.

Here's a challenge for you. Get a fresh laptop running whatever operating system you want, then see how long it takes you to fix an open bug in at least 3 of those products you mention.

You sound pissed that these FOSS projects are kicking the ass of products that you consider to be superior.

The fact that many of these projects were started by college students, grew out of commercial enterprises, or have a business model that allows people to get paid for working on them doesn't validate your claim that open source devalues your work. If anything, the opposite is true.

Here's a challenge to you: install any of your closed-source proprietary products that you're in love with and see how long it takes you to fix an open bug in one of them.

I think you could even allow the product's company to participate in the challenge. If PJ or the company can fix it faster, PJ wins.

It has been a VERY rare case where a bug has been fixed for me in an enterprise package. Work-arounds are the norm (and are painful).

It would be silly for me to be "pissed" about something that is not true.

You are missing the point. Programmers, we love what we do. I know that. I know it makes us happy to write good software and to tinker and experiment. I do it myself. I give away work all the time. I find bugs, I fix bugs, I give away code I've written in community forums and talk to people and help them find solutions to the problems they run into.

When a business person comes up to you and says, "Why should I pay you when I can get it for free?" That means your work has been devalued by a free version. The person writing that free version feels good because more users are on the system, but more users on the system does not pay the rent.

The current system of open source is flawed at its core. It means that people's skills are not sufficient to feed them.

Take the example of social networks and free websites. How many have gone bankrupt and had to lay off all their employees?

Imagine if actors in hollywood worked for free? Writers worked for free? Singers and directors and bar tenders worked for free? There'd be no movies or only the movies on Youtube that people put up there to see how many hits they get.

Can't you see that mathematically the equation doesn't balance?

Imagine if bankers on Wall Street worked for free.

Just because we love what we do doesn't mean it that work should be given away for free. Someone in another thread mentioned this very hacker news site is open source and yes I know that and I also know that pg has a bazillion dollars in the bank. Why isn't he paying someone to build it? Because he loves hacking, I know, but he is taking a job from someone. He's making the world a better place, yes, I do not discount that.

I do not discount that the world is a better place -- right now -- for many because of free software. I would say it is disporportionately better for the business commmunity that doesn't have to pay the billions of dollars their software is worth and worse for the programmers that are now being laid off in silicon valley because no one needs them to write software they can get for free.

It doesn't work.

Did you know Computer Science graduation rates are on a steady decline? Why? Because the jobs are too hard and they don't pay enough? Why? Because the products those college graduates would get paid doing don't exist because they products can't be sold for wages that can support them.

The very foundation of our society is in jeopardy because we are not paying for the work that is increasingly more relevant to its existence. Not only are college graduation rates in the computer sciences declining, but employers are complaining about the quality of programmers they are seeing coming out of colleges.

As long as we give away our labor for free, this trend will continue. There are good examples of successful quality products that have come out of the open source community and great things have been done with those products that improve many lives. I do not discount this.

What I am saying is that if this trend continues, salaries will continue to decline and those who could get paid decent salaries that could feed a family and allow them to concentrate on building the information infrastructure our world needs to continue learning, asking questions, sharing and gaining knowledge will stagnate because the individuals with the capacity to be creative in the industry will take higher paying jobs in other industries like banking and finance and look what high paying jobs in those industries gets the world.

Did an open source product steal your livelihood or something?

I would encourage you to look beyond me and myself and ad hominem arguments. This isn't about me.

Maybe you should put your thoughts on the subject into an article, or blog post, and submit it.

Your comments here are pretty hard to parse.

You're not making any sense. Here are a couple of the logical holes in your argument:

1. Demand for programming is variable, not fixed. Our demand for great programmers is arguably much higher today than it would have been without OS, because so many companies only exist today because they could afford to launch using OS, not to mention all the hybrid business models that make money off of OS (Sun, MySQL, Mozilla, etc).

2. Technology makes some people redundant. That's the nature of progress, and every major technological shift is accompanied by hand-wringing over all the jobs that will be lost. But in the end, technological progress almost always results in net job gains, net productivity gains, net wage gains. Adapt.

I think your main problem is with free market economics, not open source software.

So, out of curiosity, what on what platform do you run your web-site-building software? From your comments, I would guess IIS, ASP.NET and SQL Server.

I'm not sure you and I share the same reality.

90% of everything is crap that includes open source.

People do get paid for open source software. If you have a known OS project on your resume you will get better economic opportunities.

If woods was as cheap easy to copy and share as software, carpenters would be building giant Trojan horses in their spare time, to show of their skills and simply for the fun of it.

OS software does not devalue quality software.

If software is important to you, as in bottom line important, then you are not just happy to pay for it. If the software that works for you happens to be free you STILL look to pay someone to make sure it keeps working.

OS kills no-quality software.

> If woods was as cheap easy to copy and share as software, carpenters would be building giant Trojan horses in their spare time, to show of their skills and simply for the fun of it.

I really like this analogy. Or whatever it is.

And if a business sold that trojan horse and gave nothing to the builder, what then?

The builder can immediately go into business selling and/or supporting giant wooden horses. As one of the builders he'd have a HUGE leg up on the competition.

Or perhaps the builder knew that was going to happen and doesn't care. Or only cares that his reputation as a great builder is spread.

If some commercial horse building operation is put out of business by this, I'm surprised they were ever able to stay in business even without the free competition. Perhaps 100% of their market was pimply teenagers who only used wooden horses as toys.

>> "The end result is that every open source project out there has a system that is so different from all the rest that it would be almost impossible to participate on more than one or two without 6 boot partitions and 3 servers. I have tried to participate on multiple open source projects, but I only have 40 GB on my windows partition and I don't have the time to manage all those environments."

You seem to be complaining that people are diverse. That's a pretty odd rant to be having. Also, why are you using a windows partition to participate in open source?

There is so much wrong with this post, I am amazed that it is allowed to survive in this community.

You condemned me for complaining about a diverse world, which is not true AT ALL. And then you imply that I should not be using windows. So you condemn someone for what you believe is complaining about a diverse world and then ridicule that person for using a windows partition to participate in open source as though there is no open source on windows?

How diverse of an opinion is that?

Actually, you did sound like you were complaining about the diversity of platforms and environments that open source projects exhibit. And I didn't see him ridiculing you, just asking a question. I read the question as being this:

If you're running Windows on a 40GB partition, that implies that you are running something else as your main OS (or you need a new HD). That leaves OS X and Linux, and both are probably more widely used by and closely identified with the open source community, so why are you doing your open source work on Windows?

That's how I read it, anyway.

You were complaining about the difficulty in participating with many open source projects. I'd say using windows may not be the best way to do that.

I'm all for diversity, but use the best tool for the job, or quit complaining.

Look, I'm all for open source software ... Open source makes me angry.

May I kindly suggest a sticky-note at your desk: Don't drink and post.

I have love/hate relationships with many of my favorite things in life. Open Source is at the edge. It is creative and beautiful and also very dangerous and manipulated by greedy people who promote it because it enables them to make more profits off free labor.

Whether that is a labor of love or not is irrelevant. Love does not pay the bills.

If it did, I'd be a bazillionaire too...

Is there something wrong with making more profits because of free labor performed by those who willingly give their consent for that use?

I'm not sure who you think is getting hurt in this situation. Is it supposedly some third party who wanted to develop the same thing and charge money for it and now he can't? That's like saying that it's immoral for jobs to be replaced by technology. It's called progress.

I believe the situation we are creating is one where the most valuable jobs are those which pay people to do those things they do /not/ love. We programmers love what we do and as long as we give that love away for free, there will be less love of the job because the job will not feed us.

Instead, we will be paid to build rockets and bombs that kill people. We will be paid to construct elaborate financial systems that make profit for a few at the expense of many.

I think the world around us is one that pays people to sacrafice their conscience for a dollar. Why not instead do we pay people to do what they love? If we paid people to do what they love, there would be more love. More people would love their jobs, more people would be doing good things.

Instead, we pay people to be greedy. We pay people to kill. We pay people to do bad things because if I'm going to do something bad, someone is going to have to pay. Actually, I got tired of using my skills to do bad things.

I would rather live on the street than build a missile that is going to kill a child, yet I had a conversation just the other day with employees of Ratheon. I said, "Why don't all the hyper intelligent people out there building the bombs and the missiles and the drones guided by operators in Las Vegas just stop building that technology?"

What was the answer? "Because there's /tons/ of money in it!"

* sigh *

We have replaced the love of money with the love of work. We are paying for the erradication of love.

Look, I know where you and many in this thread are coming from. I know why you are negging me. I understand it. I get it because I too give away my labor for free. I love the feeling I get when someone's life is made better because of something I /gave/ them. I know my Karma in the real world, though not in this thread, is increasing like wild fire -- the people who use what I build love it! They /love/ it! It makes their lives better.

But I am not talking about me. I'm talking about an industry. I'm talking about an industry that is working itself out of a job in exchange for a warm and fuzzy feeling. I do not believe it is sustainable.

Technology is sustainable. Technology will continue to improve. I will never go hungry, because the skills I have are in great demand and there are way more people looking for people who can do what I do than there are people who can do what I can do, so I am not worried about myself.

I am worried about society. I am worried that this is not sustainable. I am worried that free labors of love are going to support labors of greed and crime and death and destruction.

And it worries me. It feels like this hasn't really been thought through. The high we get from giving away our labors of love is just that -- a high -- and I feel a crash is inevitable, perhaps we are in the thick of it now.

You can use the * character for italics. The /thing/ is annoying.

Offtopic, but the usual, and IMHO logical is * bold * /italic/ _underline_ Odd that it's not here...

I was at verge of writing a full-blown, deeply researched, platon backed rebuttal when suddenly, in the middle of you drawing your lines between OSS and supporting labors of greed, crime, death and destruction, I realized: You didn't adhere to your sticky note, did you?

didn't this kind of rants die off in the last millennium when they were disproved by successful free software projects and companies making money off free software (ie hiring programmers to work on free software projects)?