Discussion on:

The importance of donating to open source projects (and a giveaway!)

"Open source" has harmed the software product development profession. It shifted the expectation that people should be paid reasonably and in accordance with their productivity to the expectation that software developers should not be paid at all, or at least only paid in the form of "recognition" by the people in a tiny niche. IOW, it undermined the software meritocracy.

It also undermined the expectation that intellectual property rights should be respected.

If I were actually paid reasonably, and weren't expected to buy my own hardware and software to benefit current or potential employers, hundreds of thousands of software developers would be much better off.

Before "open source" there were at least half a dozen current proprietary operating systems, and each vendor also has its proprietary compilers, linkage editors, loaders, configuration management/version control systems, most of which were in almost every way better than the open source garbage most firms use today. And along with those tools, current guides and manuals and training courses were readily available inexpensively enough that college/university students and employees and nearly everyon in the rest of the industry had, in his own office (yes, before bull-pens and cubicles) a sizable library at his finger-tips. And, unlike e-books, they were so much more legible they did not make your eyes burn after just a few hours, and they were lavishly illustrated with word/bit diagram of data structure and table lay-outs (I'm thinking packet headings/trailers and such), ORM diagrams, detailed circuit diagrams, and they provided actual, gasp, context.

"Open source" has been an extremely destructive influence.

"software developers should not be paid at all,"
Do you mean open source corporates do not pay to their developer employees?


"It also undermined the expectation that intellectual property rights should be respected."
I miss your point here. Would you elaborate on that, professor8?

I manage an open-source project...does that count?