Opensource making developer lose their jobs?

Question

Possible Duplicate:
Does free open source software hurt programming jobs?

Sorry about my english not good, because i come from hongkong. Do anyone think about opensource will make developer lose their job on future? opensource in this topic not mean some library ,class from sourceforge or codeplex etc...because it still need people implement.What i say is like openbravo (pos),oscommerce,drupal etc. Most of them are complete package, many themes, many module, plugin, fully documentation . End user only need to know basic web site operation can be making a functional cool site. I have work work with vb6,vb.net,C#,asp.net,php from 2001 to now.

In these few years, i feeling the career path is falling down,many company is no longer need to pay $HKD15000/month (about $USD2000, which is average salary on programmer position on HK, for reference, a clerk's salary is $USD 1000, a graphic designer'salary is $USB 2000 on HK .) to hire a person to make any web apps. In asia country, hongkong, china, taiwan etc...many company are used opensource app, e.g. cms, blog system, forum, shopping cart, and pos, erp etc...what they need is get a low salary person and monitoring the system or help to buy a coffee.

On positve view, opensource make develop easy and happy, i am wordpress & drupal user, and happy with making some plugin. And because of opensource, we have many quality freeware to use ,or lower the cost when you start your business,it many advantage on that, but on negative view, it's what i mentioned above.

Not much student to take computing subject on university , many developers are lose heart to learn new things. Do it happening on your country?? And what salary on programmer on your country?

Answer 1

No, Open Source will never make people lose their jobs (totally).

There's a theory that dictates that people feel more secure in something they have to pay for than something they get for free.

We have a saying, You get what you pay for.

What will happen is that the 'easy' stuff will become open source, leaving the developers that rely on 'easy' stuff unemployed. The developers that concentrate on the 'harder' parts on Software engineering will always have jobs.

Answer 2

I bet this will get closed soon, but, to answer the question, only developers whose only skill was creating very simple websites will lose their jobs because of php/python/drupal/ruby/etc.

Answer 3

Open source has caused a shift from proprietary, single-source applications to collaborative works. It has changed the attitude of companies like Microsoft, who now embrace open source, both as a source of development tools (e.g. jQuery) and as a source of design patterns (e.g. MVC).

Open source does not eliminate jobs. Rather it speeds the development of new applications, improves the quality of new and existing applications, and creates new service industries. There will still be a need for paid developers. They just work at a different level now.

Answer 4

No, I don't believe so, if nothing else most places that seriously tap into OSS make customizations to fit the particulars of their business. So they may not being going right from scratch, but developers are still needed.

Answer 5

New technology is disruptive and will doom some jobs and create others. I'll not presume to guess whether the net effect is more or less jobs.

What counts for you is YOUR job. So you may indeed want to think about your path. Perhaps you should become a Drupal consultant and charge a large hourly rate to fix the mess amateurs make with Drupal.

Answer 6

Open Source and the exchange of payment for services can work very well together. If you sponsor the development of some code, and it does what you need it to, does it really matter if the source code is published? It's not impossible to publish/disclose the source and still require royalties to use it (it depends on the licence).

Many developers of Open Source code do so under paid employment: it's not just "amateurs hacking" in their free time. Look at IBM, Red Hat, Sun, SUSE, etc. for example.

Support is another aspect with monetary value: I'd be the first to admit that documentation is often a weak point in many FOSS projects, but good documentation is something that a paying customer would rightly demand. People can use their expertise in supporting, documenting, deploying or extending a particular Open Source system to make money quite happily.

Answer 7

software like Joomla and Wordpress are open source, but it also creates jobs with support, customisation, extension & templates developent. developers who used to develop cms just need to change from developing from scratch to develop to extend open source products. many open source products make use of good design patterns and have standards to discourage bad code. like MVC which is great. the "bad" is that u got to learn something new, which takes time

i feel that open source is a good way to go as it allows the community to constantly improve on ur code. except it also opens the door to hackers to find flaws and make use of them. but somehow open source linux still seem free from such things. closed source windows seem to be a bigger target.

Answer 8

The way I see it: open source will absolutely flourish for applications that us normal users use every day, be it operating system (linux), browser (ff, chrome etc) etc. Maybe even for academia, as we really need the kind of sharing and collaborative work environment in the interest of science. However, enterprise software will never be completely free. Even if some of the software big corporations used are free, they will most likely hire a bunch of smart people to maintain it for them.

So to conclude, I think that even in the unlikely event that open source takes over the entire pie, I don't think that jobs will be lost. Instead of writing commercial software that everyone buys, we'll be maintaining and/or adapting open source software instead for big corporations instead.