[Discuss] Publish or Perish - coming to sw dev & IT operations

[richb at pioneer.ci.net (Rich Braun)]

Last Sunday, the lead NY Times business-page story about a local (to me)
startup caught my eye (for a parochial reason, I'd turned down a job there
four months ago).  Then I thought about BLU as I wandered around the office
this morning, noticing some of the aging/antique Apple-logo detritus that
people coworkers have tossed into the common areas, and thinking about this
morning's news report that street robbers are increasingly favoring Galaxy
phones over iPhones.

Gild is a startup that hopes to displace LinkedIn among employers who are
looking for the best applicants.  The algorithm they're using relies on
searchable information that you as a potential applicant have published about
yourself:  at this point, I think it's mostly open-source contributions in
places like GitHub or SourceForge.

Personally, I'd already come to the conclusion sometime around 2011 that I'd
better start building an open-source portfolio:  it's no longer enough to
/use/ open-source software, your reputation in the future will depend on
/contributing/ to it.  So far, I haven't had a lot of time to put into it but
at my current job I will soon be able to.

Thinking about the future of companies like Apple, which are firmly in the
closed-source/proprietary trade-secrets realm, it seems to me that if this
recent shift in the world of IT employment continues, it could speed such
companies' demise as their access to job applicants dries up.

Is the open-source software movement going to create a new world of haves and
have-nots based on the amount of time and freedom that individuals working as
employees to contribute into open-source?  Is this a good thing, or will it
just lead to a new generation of employable super-stars and leave everyone
else out in the cold?

-rich