'The man who wants to take your jobs'

[Derek Atkins]

"Rich Braun" <richb at pioneer.ci.net> writes:

> Suppose we lived in a world where mankind only had to write an Office suite
> once.  An airline reservation system once.  A personal-organizer program once.
>  One browser.  And so on.  I don't mean that the feature set would remain
> static:  there would be many refinements over the years.  But instead of
> rewriting the same basic utilities over and over again, folks would have
> access to the work of their predecessors and could "stand on their shoulders"
> to invent wholly new functionality.

But... this doesn't happen in the open source world, either.  How many
different UI toolkits do we have?  How many different financial apps?
How many different scheme interpretters?

Open Source is *SO* cheap that any programmer can start his/her own
project and NOT reuse the code that has come before.  So instead of
one happy family we get dozens of competing, half-assed,
non-fully-functional applications where none of the projects have
enough resources to take the final steps into greatness.

> Proprietary software has cut off access to much of this possibility in the
> Microsoft world.  But the Gnu concept took off once Linux came out, and the
> open-source vision has thrived.  Free-lance programmers do have a huge base of
> code to work with.

Not that I'm a fan of proprietary software, but there is something to
be said about having a set of known resources to plan out and work on
the pieces of software that are managed by a project manager to make
sure the project comes to completion in a reasonable about of time
with a reasonable set of additional features and bug-fizes.

Personally, I'd like to find a way to get paid for my work on OSS so I
could work on it full time rather than eek out hours when I can.  But
I need to pay the mortgage, so I need a "real job".

Why shouldn't I get paid for my hard work?

-derek

-- 
       Derek Atkins, SB '93 MIT EE, SM '95 MIT Media Laboratory
       Member, MIT Student Information Processing Board  (SIPB)
       URL: http://web.mit.edu/warlord/    PP-ASEL-IA     N1NWH
       warlord at MIT.EDU                        PGP key available