If Riehle's analysis is correct - and while his thinking is logical, he offers no hard proof of the economic effects he describes - then what we're seeing playing out among coders is what I'll term the Programmer's Dilemma. Because skills in open source programming are increasingly necessary to enhance the potential career prospects of individual programmers, individual programmers have strong motivations to join in - and as more programmers join in, the incentive for each individual programmer to participate becomes ever stronger. At the same time, the total amount of money that goes to programmers falls as open source is adopted by more companies. Individual programmers, in other words, have selfish motives to engage in collectively destructive behavior.
Baloney.
As a developer, and one that uses and contributes to open source, I think some key points have been missed.
1. Seth nailed one of them -- it's not a closed system. If you think in terms of proprietary stacks and jobs for a given company, then sure. But the world is a big place. Big companies aren't innovating any more. Name something truly mind-blowing that has come out of Microsoft, IBM, SAP, or Oracle. It's not happening. If we developers let the market be stifled by corporate short-term thinking and mismanagement, the market as a whole will die off.
2. Joy. Good developers don't write good code because they have to, they write good code because they want to. It's like an artistic thing: corporate life hampers the interesting innovative stuff you want to work on, so when you go home you write interesting code and release it to the open source community. Simply for the joy of it.
3. Community. Many (not all) good developers are slightly introverted. Contributing to a community of like-minded people across the world gives a great sense of belonging that you simply don't get in a corporate environment.
4. Continuity. You can work on the same OSS projects for years. Jobs are short term. Working for free sucks. But many (good) developers are either contractors or skip companies every 1-3 years. They go to where the interesting work and good pay is. This is a direct result of offshoring. Companies are getting back what they've been dishing out. So what if developers get paid less at IBM because they aren't building as many proprietary solutions any more -- go work for someone that will value you.
5. Gives you a sense of purpose. Not all of us are driven completely by money -- something that economists don't get. There are other levers, including contributing to the development of third world nations. Look at Ubuntu. It was created specifically to address the needs of Africans that can't afford proprietary software.
6. Street cred. Nothing gives you more cred and notoriety (and into interviews) than contributing something genuinely elegant or innovative back to a bunch of people that can appreciate it.
7. Control. You get to decide on what to create, not some suit that doesn't get it.
8. Meritocracy. Your work is judged on it's own worth, not how you look, your accent, or what school you come from. Geeks love meritocracies.
9. Freedom. You own open source. Requiring proprietery 'ware means that it owns you.
http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2007/04/open_source_and.php
