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Open Source is Not a Career Path
codermarc writes ""If you're getting into open source because you see it as a career path, you're doing something wrong." It's not that Linux creator Linus Torvalds thinks open-source programmers should work for peanuts (he doesn't), but rather that they should be properly motivated. Call it software with a soul, if you like. Only the truly passionate need apply."
That applies to almost any job if you want to do well. Remember all the faux-geeks that went to school during the dot-com-bomb for the money? Those are the ones now working the help desk in their late 20's/early 30's or doing crap work for a 5 PC shop (assuming they're still working in the geek biz)
Trolling is a art,
I don't see open source as an entire career per se, but rather as a sort of means to an end. Developing open source is a great way to augment your career, to get your name "out there", and to give something back to the community. Being an open source developer gets you recognition, and recognition can get you business from people, organizations, or businesses that need closed source software. That's how I see things, anyway. Not a whole career, but a viable part of a career.
Also remember that some open source developers are// paid and do make a career out of it.
This is like saying that you shouldn't build model trains unless you are motivated to do it. Poppycock.
Doing anything for pay is a great way to guide your career. Here's the thing: You never know what the next step will lead to. That's really essential.
I was reading about a guy in Ohio who married a Japanese exchange student. They were dirt poor, he was only, through odd jobs, able to bring home about $100 a month. They lived in his parents' basement and it was really a terrible life.
So his wife suggested that he and she move to Kyoto, where she is from, and she could have better job prospects and he could work as an English teacher. They moved and actually did fairly well in Japan.
Then he decided to follow a "career path" and started his own English school. It failed, miserably. They were forced to move further out into the countryside of Japan.
Out in the country, there was less demand for English teachers, but the wife was able to make enough to survive on.
The husband was experienced in some carpentry since he worked a little with his father in Ohio building houses and furniture. So he built a house for the family out in the countryside of Japan. Very Western. Next thing you know, his neighbors are asking him to build houses and furniture and to redecorate homes in Western style.
Well, if he had followed his career path, then he'd be flat broke and living on the streets of Ohio or Kyoto. But because he was flexible, he was able to find a way to make money and support his family.
There is no such thing as a "career path" except for people with very narrow minds.
Do what you love and love what you do. If you don't like it, then you're in the wrong career. If you don't like programming as a job and prefer to something else for a living then do that. OSS for me (not for others) is about writing code that I am proud of period. That's it. I don't seek some reward or recogition. If someone finds what I write useful, that's a bonus, but frankly that's not my motivation. More often than not, I am forced to code crap because some manager thinks X should be done in Y time. Luckily, my current job isn't that way and I get to make code reliable and well tested.
In fact it is a career path
Involvement with popular open source packages is very impressive. Being able to say to your employer "I added feature _______ to project ________" is one way to put something unique on your resume before you graduate college. It's worth double if the employer knows the product, and tripple if they use that feature.
IMHO that's important. It is a career path. It's not a career (except for a few lucky souls). There are a few who make a living off of it (Mozilla hackers for MoFo, IBM, SUN, Google, Novell), RedHat, etc. That is a career.
But to say it's not a career path... that's a boatload of BS. It's been a career path for many individuals.
Not to mention it's one of the greatest learning experiences. I think I've learned more from open source than any class. Much more.
Programming open source, releasing your code, is something you should do for your own enjoyment. There have been a number of cases of developers becoming disillusioned because their open source project failed to generate them any money, or got forked off into something else that became more popular. As disconcerting as that can be, it is a natural result of releasing your code under a license that allows such things. If you want control, if you want to be guaranteed money, then you should license your code accordingly.
Open source code is about scratching your own itch, doing what interests you (and potentially no one else), and the pleasures of problem solving associated with writing software. Yes, some open source projects have resulted in success for their developers because it turned out that what that person was interested in writing was somethign that a lot of people were interested in using. In the end though, almost all the really successful open source coders are people who did what they wanted to do for their own reasons. People who are passionate and interested in what they're coding (an advantage an open source coder has, being able to code whatever interests them) are far more likely to write good code than those disinterested in their projects, which has helped make some open source projects highly successful, but it is no guarantee of success or popularity.
The advantage of open source from the developers perspective is that they have the opportunity to do exactly what they want to do, exactly what interests them. The disadvantage is that what interests you may very well be of interest to very few others.
Jedidiah
Craft Beer Programming T-shirts
If your a unix geek and want to make money, write for Mac OS X.
Mac OS X: Unix with paying customers.
I agree that it's important to have open source programmers be people who really love the technology and want to innovate and contribute to the project. The thing about the article that confused me though was that it gives the impression that there are hoards of programmers jumping on the OSS bandwagon hoping to make a quick buck, but I don't really see that in my experience.
Still being in school, I see a LOT of people who went into computers just to make a quick buck, all of them are very strong microsoft advocates.
Are there people who go into OSS just to make a buck? from what I've seen, people who are primarily interested in money are also huge proprietary software supporters, sort of like if the only thing you care about is money, you can't imagine anyone else coding for the love of it, and therefore can't imagine F/OSS being any good at all.
Famous Last Words: "hmm...wikipedia says it's edible"
In growing economies open source may be useful for getting you in the door after college. Once you're in the door or in a declining economy open source will cost you. Managers resent employees who are more visible than they are. Other programmers resent you for upstaging them in public. While everyone who programs free software in college can be considered doing it for the credentials, anyone still doing it after college
is probably doing it for themself.
...and by extension, business software is only as popular as it is easy to support. If it weren't for the people who don't code, the ones who just run the systems, and who do make some money at it, Open Source would not be as dominant in the server market.
So while I see his point, you're right -- it's from a narrow persective. Developers like Linus aren't the ones that get approached when the rubber hits the road, maintainers are. He may look at less famous developers than himself and see little chance of them making money off their work (or less chance of them developing something decent because they are expecting to), and he may be right. He's looking at the wrong group of people, though.
Someone had to do it.
Well, I used to be a graphics designer until the dot-bomb implosion. I was left with unemployment or entry-level in a new career. After a year and a half, I chose IT. My choices were Windows or Unix. I chose Unix/Linux because it seemed that there were too many MCSEs and A+ certifications flooding the market and I had been "playing" with Linux for a couple of years. I went back to school, got a Unix SysAdmin Certification.
Currently, I work for a commercial software company that creates Linux specific software. I make a good living, I enjoy my job and I sleep well at night.
The idea that choosing OSS or Linux as a career path has worked for me. If I didn't look at it that way and took the MS path, I would probably still be "playing" with Linux and have to spend all day removing spyware from Windows boxes. No thanks.
Flexible bare-metal recovery for Linux/UNIX
An old man was fired from his janitorial government job of 30 years when a new hotshot manager discovered he could not read or write.
Walking home through the city after his last day, he really wanted a smoke, but could not find a place selling cigarettes. So, he took what little money he had and opened a small cigarette stand on that street.
People bought cigarettes from him. He opened another one. And he opened another one. Finally, he had too much money to keep under his mattress and went to the bank.
The banker was impressed at all the money he had earned considering he was not literate. The banker says to the old man "imagine where you could have been if you knew how to read and write." The old man replied, "I don't have to imagine, I would have still been a janitor."
--- -- - -
Give me LIBERTY, or give me a check.
I think you missed the point. Linus does not deny that open source development can lead you to a good job. He just doesn't want the kind of people who are into open source only for the (future) money, he prefers idealists. Being offered a good job should be a side-effect, not the motivation.
Horsepuckey.
It all depends on what having an "Open Source Career" means to you.
I write database-driven weblications with Linux/Apache/PostgreSQL/PHP. I get plenty of opportunities to contribute to the OSS community, (and I do) typically by providing documentation.
I don't primarily make my living actually writing OSS code, but I frequently release libraries and codebases I consider "commodity". I help out other people.
I contribute to email lists, online forums, etc. and use Open Source software as a platform to provide services for small to mid-size organizations.
No career in OSS? PFFFT!
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
Why Open Source Software is Bad for the Software Development Industry
Introduction
This paper will discuss Open Source Software (OSS) and its detrimental effect on the software industry. In particular, OSS devalues the software market and thus has a direct impact on the value of the individual software developer, the traditional software development vendor, and also reduces the innovation of the software development industry by limiting the amount of capital that can be spent on research and development.
Open Source Software
Open Source Software (OSS) is defined as a software product where access to the full source code is available to anyone, and includes the right to modify and redistribute the source code. OSS has had a long history in the software industry, however has been mostly limited to software to service the technical community. Recently, OSS has made inroads in the commercial, non-technical areas. Today, Open Source variants of common software packages such as word processors, web browsers, databases, and graphics toolsets are available from a variety of sources.
The Negative Impact of OSS
The impact of OSS is felt throughout the software development industry. Such software is widely distributed via the Internet and is usually made available for zero, or near zero, cost to the end user. The net result is a devaluation of software in financial terms and a loss of valuable revenue streams which drive research and development and innovation in the software development industry.
Many OSS packages are simply designed to be "drop-in" replacements of the corresponding closed source applications and simply copy the "look and feel" and the interface elements of the closed source equivalents. Although these replacement packages do not typically offer the feature set of their closed source counterparts, they usually are regarded as "good enough" by most end-users due to their low acquisition costs. This low (usually zero) cost simply drives down the market value of all applications in that class. This seems to be a good thing for the end user, as it reduces the near term capital outlay to acquire functional software packages, however it has a much more dire effect on the long-term viability of the software industry.
OSS alternatives usually appear after a successful commercial package appears on the market. These OSS copies will leverage the results of the large R&D investments made by the closed source vendors, and eliminates or severely reduces the need for the OSS producers to make similar investments in R&D. Even if the OSS copy does not provide the full functionality of the closed source offering, it will typically offer "good enough" value to the end user with low-end needs. This serves to eliminate any revenue potential for that segment of the market. You can see the effect of this most prominently in the web server area. Since there is at least one OSS web server package freely available, most users can choose to deploy an OSS variant of the software instead of choosing a closed source shrink-wrapped software package. This has served to eliminate many commercial closed source companies from the web server market. Those few that remain either have very deep funding from some other source, or serve very specialized segments of the market where an OSS alternative has not appeared yet. The long-term effect of this pressure on the low end of the market is to severely reduce the revenue necessary to produce new innovative products. Since these OSS offerings are also typically direct copies of the closed source product, no new innovation occurs and the segment will stagnate. This effect has already been seen in the database and web server areas where OSS has made significant inroads. In particular, the OSS "Apache" web server has captured majority share of both the low-end and high-end of the market segment. This has resulted in very little innovation in the web server market, as start-up companies are unable to enter the market.
Conclusion
I
I'm not objecting the the article, but to the fact that yet again, the submitter plaigiarized the article. You can write 'Larry Greenmeier reports' or 'according to the InformationWeek Weblog' then quote to your heart's content. When the submitter simply copies and pastes the article and includes no attribution, it implies that the submitter wrote that paragraph. That's plagiarism. Editors, get it together - this is unacceptable.
Utter horseshit. While not everyone can get to work for a Cygwin or OSDL, a savy OSS programmer will eventually pick up the skills needed to participate in large, complex projects. This is resume fodder of the highest order. Those who are project initiators or maintainers will get to apply for jobs like "Architect" and be taken seriously. It's a way of ganing experience without having any experience... and experience means more money and seniority when landing a new job.
SoupIsGood Food
"Great hackers think of it [coding] as something they do for fun, and which they're delighted to find people will pay them for."
The other part of it is pointing out that choosing to go into open source like you'd choose to work in a supermarket at uni, really wont work. In the open source world it gets you almost nowhere because being a good coder is something you can't fake. If you're doing it for the bullet point on your resume then it'll all seem like too much work the first time somebody rips on your code.
Nerd: Derogatory term typically directed at anybody with a lower Slashdot ID than you.
seriously, what is up lately that the people submitting articles can't even bother to write their own summary? i can't even think of how many articles on slashdot in the last two weeks have been just a copy/paste of the first paragraph of the page they were linking to.
Not that this is a new phonomenon or anything, but it seems to have gotten way out of hand lately.
If I don't put anything here, will anyone recognize me anymore?
I think that Linus is really trying to say that he really agrees more with the Free Software Foundation's GNU Philosophy more than the Open Source Initiative's, though he continues to use the term "Open Source." This is where some of the confusion comes from.
I think the OSI has effected great positive change in making business aware of the benefits of Free/Open Source software, but I think they were pretty arrogant and short-sighted to try to 'dump the confrontational attitude that has been associated with "free software"'. The idea that freedom is important for its own sake may be confrontational to a lot of businessmen, but that doesn't make it any less true.
I think a lot of conflict could be avoided if RMS would admit that business cases are important for Free Software and ESR would admit that freedom of Open Source software is important in its own right.
"OSS developers also make money somehow"
No they don't. Its a race to the bottom. Its like some guy coming in and giving candles away and causing the candle makers to go out of business, even if they offered a superior candle. Most people will choose a "good enough" free alternative, which eliminates everything else in the market and drags everything down into just being "good enough". Bad idea.
Well with all the outsourcing it's not like programmers will have many paid jobs left anyway but that's another point.
And you still do not understand economics or software, first of all there is a lot of very expensive software (thousands of dollars) which will never be OSS unless one of the makers gets generous. Then it will still cost thousands for support and nothing will change. Actually the code is probably so horrid it will never be OSS (some is coded by outsourced programmers in India who make sure there are enough bugs to keep them in business, and that the code is unreadable enough that nobody can replace them). Then there are large companies which pay people to write custom software for their needs, or commercial software aimed at very specific markets.
If OSS writers cannot support themselves then they won't have time to code OSS, then paid programs will appear again and people will pay due to their superiority to OSS. It's a natural economic system of checks and balances and I don't see what you're complaining about. It won't ever hit the bottom because long before then paid software would make a return.
There is nothing wrong with working help desk in general; it's an important job. But there is something wrong with working help desk in your 30's from your own point of view if you got into the field with visions of making billions instantly with only minimal knowledge of computers. The elitism here is the elitism of the people who chose a career in computers without the right preparation.
Not that all pure sciences get the funding they need, but if you compare OSS core developers to academic and non-applied research scientists, there are many similarities -- and one difference. There are a lot less of them that manage to get funding for their "pure" research.
The parallels between scientists who pay the bills and get their toys by developing applied science to OS core devs that get hired on by companies for research work are pretty strong, and in that case, I'd say the playing field is a little more equal, though I doubt it is fair.
I picture the heavy OS developers as sort of floating in between the two mostly -- what they want to develop has more of an applied nature, so they don't get the respect pure scientists do (when they do), but at the same time, the spirit of the developer is more aligned with that of the pure scientist -- they want to explore things on their own terms.
If software was truly considered an "engineering" discipline, rather than "computer science" then maybe that would make a home for developers as research fellows at engineering colleges. But even that third category (which I must fess up to belonging to) doesn't consider it really to be "hard core" enough to qualify for their accolades.
Someone had to do it.
While you're dead on about what Linus is talking about, I think people need to recognize that the support community play an important role. These are the people that find the bugs, and often send in patches. They only "develop" 1-5% of their time, but without their aggregate effort OpenSource would be nowhere... just a bunch of buggy programs that only get fixed enough to do what a few fanatics (good connotation desired) want them to do.
And if they can get paid doing it, more power to them. Not that I wouldn't like to see that happen for developers, too, but I don't begrudge the sysops.
Someone had to do it.
Remember the scene in the bar when the genius contemplates what it would mean if nobody went after the girl?
As far as I'm concerned, if you want to make the world a better place, pursue your interests. Do not pursue a position, power, fame, money, or even a living. As long as you pursue what you truly love, the rest will take care of itself. This is not spiritual mumbo-jumbo. Only the most jaded and closed-minded of folks lambaste the FOSS movement as a 'software industry destroyer' and ask superficial questions like "But how do you make a living writing free software?".
Do what you love. Do what you are passionate about. The money will take care of itself.
Sigh,
How many people just like to read the things they want to read instead of actually try to understand it.
If you want to understand Linus' reasoning i suggest you get your hands on a copy of Pekka Himanen's "The Hacker Ethic".
I consider myself "old skool" IT. I became an IT because i love the technology and it's possibilities. Around me i hear other reasons.. "the job opportunities were good and i saw a chance to get rich quickly" or "well.. i didn't know what to do so i chose this". Linus just asks people to question their reasons. Are you an IT worker who is just in it for the fun or are you one who wan't to make a big career but don't care in what? The first does not exclude the latter and in fact history has shown that the first often leads to the latter. However, of late, new FOSS developers became FOSS developers because they are looking for a career instead of having fun and/or creating art.
They don't care about FOSS, they only care about their career which happens to involve FOSS right now but that can easily be replaced by the "next big thing" come opportunity and chance. They have no real love for FOSS or it's possibilities.
You can have a career in FOSS. A good one in fact.. but please.. do it for the love it. If you create something in FOSS, be prepared to support and or develop it for a long time. Do not abbandon it when you decide to get a career change.
Some clarification, i'm not a software developer. All i know is out of what i experience and read about. Wish i had the drive and passion for software developing.. but simply put.. i'm scared of it... sometimes i'm just glad i can get a piece of software installed (be it on windows or Linux, doesn't matter).
In my country, we call people who do things for free yet magically expect to be paid somehow anyway idiots.
That's not to say that I'm against open source in any way -- I'm an open source developer myself, and it's really fulfilling making software that people enjoy. The thing is, I don't misrepresent what I do; If I wanted to make money, it wouldn't be giving away my work for free.
-Insert identifier here
This is true of any creative endeavour. Musicians who sing / play because they want to get rich are rarely better than those who play because they love music so much they want to dedicate their life to it. A carpenter who loves working with wood is almost certain to produce better work than one who doesn't really care about what he's doing but looks forward to the paycheck at the end.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Yes, my only tool is a hammer. And you're starting to look like a nail.