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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."
AFTER THE QUALITY GOES IN...
After all, paying people to write software hasn't exactly given us bulletproof and easy to use products...why NOT have people write code because they like to.
what am I saying? software is the only paychek I ever had!
SLASHDOT: news for people who can't concentrate on work or have no life at all and got tired of yelling back at the TV.
The only reason to get into this game is because you like to play. If you are looking to advance in your career or make a lot of money, you have got the completely wrong idea. If that's your goal, go to school and get an MBA and then work on becoming a business person. Otherwise, play, rock, compute!
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
I think there is plenty of "career path" in Open Source if you approach it as a "service industry." Well, basically I think that software development is dead as an industry, OpenSource or no, except for the "service industry" angle. People who try to make software into a "invention" that pays out long after it has been written are IMO fooling themselves.
Anyway, there are other good reasons to do open source. My current one is perhaps a little more "real world" than those I have had before:
USCVprogs
Someone had to do it.
Ironically, the open source developers who developer "for free" in their spare time are, in a way, under-cutting their cousins who are getting paid to develop software for a living.
Like if a bunch of mechanics openned a garage after work and fixed cars for free, wouldn't that hurt the income of the mechanics who are open for business in their off-shift?
Just saying -- hopefully the effect will be to force companies to produce better and more innovative commercial software, but I feel sorry for the poor Borland employee who lost his job because his buddy is working on Eclipse after hours.
Just saying,
Sam
Fact: Both space organizations used pencils at first, but pencils have problems because if you little bits of graphite floating in the air, you've got a problem.
And space pens were, in fact, not developed by NASA, but were instead developed by an independent developer.
Source.
(I suppose I shouldn't reply to this, but whatever. It's always good to get the truth out there.)
"Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity." -- Hanlon's Razor
Sure, it's a great path, as long as you go in as a CONSULTANT ($$$). Otherwise, it will always remain as a part time job (unless you work at Sun or IBM though
See another reply I did. What I meant was getting into it for the money and a hot career backfired on those without the real love for it. I know people working help desk that love the work they do. Those are the geeks. The ones that hate every moment of their waking life are the ones that gambled and lost. Those are the ones I was directing my comment at.
Trolling is a art,
Linus is really talking about OS developers, and people who tikner with the source code. Not so much the sys admins and sales people. I think it's a fair enough comment. Only those with a passion for coding will motivate themselves to excel at it.
In my experience, all the money motivated people that got into IT want to desperately jump on the Microsoft bandwagon. They saw how software licencing could be a total money rort (thanks to the MS experience) they wanted a piece of the pie.
When they failed to get into MS, they turned into IT sales managers.
I've met good sales managers, and bad ones of course. The difference is that good sales managers do their job PRIMARILY because they gain satisfaction from helping people.
The bad sales managers are only motivated to sell the product as fast as they can and wrangle as much money as they can in the deal. And they're also a pain to be around.
I won't ask "who makes more money?" because the answer is misleading. I will ask "Who enjoys their job more, has a happier less stressful life, and plenty of friends?" and the answer is quite clear.
Who sleeps better at night? Bill or Linus?
That's the real question.
READY.
PRINT ""+-0
Dear Slashdot,
My name is Rob, I'm 24 and I'm a professional open source programmer. I like my job, and I'm paid comparably to other programmers in my field. The difference between me and most, however, is that I'm a researcher and I'm funded by a grant. Our software is developed to be used by the research and academic community. Now I'm not saying I'm typical, but certainly I see jobs similar to mine forming. Its no longer okay to just submit a paper and call that research. People are beginning to demand the code to go along with the paper and granting bodies understand this.
The market is changing everyday. Companies like IBM are proving that software is a service and not a product, and competition from other countries is turning many software jobs to commodity jobs. Everyone in software reinvents themself. My father has reinvented himself about 6 times during his career and will retire within the next 10 years doing a job completely different from his post graduate training.
I'm not going to sit and preach, but in two paragraphs I was able to give plenty of personal basis to reconsider the crux of the argument.
Food for thought
Look, any field you get into is going to say "don't do it for the money, do it because you like it!"
Computer geeks say it about IT.
Lawyers say it about law.
Doctors say it about medicine.
But what about the fields NOBODY likes? Did you ever hear Joe Toiletscrubber say "don't clean toilets for the money, do it because you like it!"? Highly doubtful.
The truth is, people do go into fields for the money -- including the computer geeks, the lawyers (especially corporate and IP lawyers), the doctors, and so forth. People take up jobs as garbage collectors, NOT because they're passionate about it, but because it's a job few other people are willing to do -- and it pays well because of that fact. Garbage collectors do it for the money.
So do strippers. And prostitutes (indeed, prostitutes in Nevada have been known to work for about 3-4 years, then retire for life with over $1 million in income for their time in bed).
There are people who get PhD's in the natural sciences NOT because they enjoy their academic field of study, but because they know they will make more money with a PhD than a lesser degree.
Telling people to "do it because you love it" is a nice ideal. But ultimately, all things revolve around money, and people will work in IT because there is decent money to be made there (yes, even now with the offshoring and the lack of dot-bombs to leech from, IT is still a relatively well-paying career path).
Be honest: are YOU passionate about processing business reports? How about maintaining 25 year-old COBOL apps? I sure as hell am not (though the theoretical side of "computer science" does interest me).
Are you even passionate about writing code for other people in general when the project is not one of your choice or even really particularly interesting? I'm not -- but I do it anyway, because there are far worse jobs (waiting tables, shoveling shit in Louisiana) that pay far-less too, and I can find ways to trick myself into liking the work I'm not interested in.
Anybody who says "do it for the love of the work" probably enjoys their work so much that they're at the top of the pack -- and Torvalds is probably the best example in the world. If you love your labor, more power to you.
The rest of us, however, will work at what we do because we're competent enough to get paid for it and we enjoy it just enough not to do something else we enjoy more instead -- but we're mentally-balanced enough not to revolve our lives around our work.
Is Capitalism Good for the Poor?
The idea that the happiest people are those who have a passion for their profession is nothing new. Linus is just restating that old truism in the context of working with Free software. But in reality it applies just as much to the proprietary coder too and just as much to an advertising exec and even to a call-girl, or (dare I say it) lawyers (there are A LOT of unhappy lawyers out there).
Linus's statement seems to have brought out the latent belief in a lot of people that "you can't make money writing Free software." This belief is a falsehood and it only takes a few seconds of rational thought to discover that.
1) Redhat makes money, the employees of Redhat make money. Redhat works with 100% Free software, thus working with Free software CAN and IS profitable.
2) Last I read, IBM currently has over 600 engineers employed working on Free software, maybe even just Linux alone. Those guys are getting paid and IBM ain't doing it for charity, they are doing it to add value to the services and products that they sell their customers.
The way you personally can make money from Free software is not by selling identical shrink wrapped copies, that only works for old-school, copyright-cartel, value-sucking companies. Instead, you make money by ADDING value to Free software. In other words, custom development. This works for the 1-man contract developer as well as huge consulting organizations like IBM's Global Services. Take currently existing Free software and build on it to solve a specific customer's specific requirements. You get paid for that work and, depending on the contract, the effort either stays within the client company or is shared back to the rest of the world. The GPL is designed specifically for that kind of situation and it is no surprise given that RMS often worked on contract tweaking GNU software for individual clients.
So forget all this baloney that Free software "takes away jobs" and the like because it doesn't. Instead, Free software is about not having to re-invent the wheel so that business that USE software can do more for less and are thus even more efficient in the long run. That efficiency helps the ENTIRE economy, not just a select few members of the copyright cartel.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
Replace the words "open source" with "playing rock music", or "acting", or "joining the circus", then you'd get the idea. Linus is trying to play "mom". Mom told us all those things, but lucky for us guys like Paul McCartney and Marlon Brando did not listen to their moms.
Sun and Fun
Excellent analogy. I wish more people understood this point.
Seeing as I like to look at everything from an economist's eyes, I look at the OSS movement, and what I see are idealistic college students and Europeans whose welfare states enable them to live in meager homes with meager food and no job so they may sit at home and write code. As with any hierarchical structure (in this case, of recognition), a few get paid well (the Linus Torvalds' of the world, who can afford to live on the California coast and drive a BMW), but the rest get little, if anything.
As a hobbyist economist, I look for other fields in which the same sort of suicidal tendencies occur. Music? Arguably this is the best analogy. Musicians often play for free, in order to gain recognition (fans), and once they gain enough recognition, they begin charging for their work (to see live shows, buy CDs, etc.). Perhaps they even sign a record deal (analogous to joining Novell or Sun or IBM on your OSS recognition), and then get paid a decent living. But relative to the number of other musicians attempting the same thing, the number who succed in that venture is small.
So it will be with the open-source world: a few highly-skilled coders get paid while the rest find other work and code in their spare time, receiving only recognition to boost their ego and cock size as payment.
Musicians do this too. And they're (in)famously-poor...
I love OSS as much as anybody else and have happily been using Linux and FreeBSD and their associated apps for years, because it doesn't cost me anything, the code is generally of fast, usable, stable quality, and I can change the source if need be (which I've done in some cases to make a particular app compile). Insofar as I have the freedom to do almost anything I want with it and obtain it legally at no charge, it's wonderful. And anybody who is not a developer feels the same way: it's great feeling like you're getting "something for nothing."
But there ain't no such thing as a free lunch; you can't get your "money for nothin and your chicks for free." Nor is software really ever "free" as in economically-free. But leave it to the leftists of the software world to fail to realize this...
Open-source developers are collectively coding their way out of paying jobs, and unless it becomes as common as the GPL to use a license which does one or more of the following:
* charges money for the source
* charges money for the binaries
* requires a support contract for a fee
* prevents all for-profit and governmental use (thereby legally requiring the various businesses and governments to pony up for the software, even while allowing private individuals to use it for free)
-- I don't see how OSS developers will survive unless they get into another career and code in their spare time, unless they wish to live like musicians...
The OSS community really needs to look farther down the road and realize that OSS is a *development* model, not a *business* model. And anybody without a business model (even if your "business" is simply selling your time to some employer for 40 hours/week) becomes poor...
What we really need is a license that simultaneously allows and enforces a means of openly-available source to which all may contribute and work on, but which also charges a fee. I could almost see a system of micropayments coming into play here (e.g. developers get paid in micropayments based on how much work they're doing in accordance with the revenues of the software sold to non-developers)... Almost.
(Actually, might that be doable? e.g. by limiting developer access (and payment, obviously) only to those signed up as employees of the project? But then you'd get the problem of people signing up to be developers who would never develop anything but instead download and compile the code themselves, then release the binaries to "average" people. I suppose that could be included in the developer license though...)
The best co
Is Capitalism Good for the Poor?
I do it for shits and giggles.
If I could sell any OSS what I write I probably would, but having writtena good deal of proprietary software for close to a decade, I doubt the value of anything I've written exceeds the cost of the meagre bandwidth it takes to have it.
Nonethless people keep downloading what I write (and posting feature requests and bug reports and their own little tweaks) and I keep having fun doing it all and so long as there's intrest beyond my own and I'm having fun, I'll keep doing it.
I wonder what linus' take on the likes of me is.
You're just not looking at the job from the right angle.
There's joy in taking someone who doesn't know what a mouse is and helping them solve a problem for some people. A good helpdesk tech, who can empathize with his callers' frustration and calm them down, while solving their problems(with the limited senses of a layman, no less), can find his work extremely rewarding.
I spent a full year working helpdesk before I went back to college to get into Electrical Engineering, and had a blast. I honestly think that computer technician courses should include a basic psychology course of everyone's sake, though. Without the ability to calm callers down, I can see helpdesk being nowhere near as fun as it was for me.
-Insert Identifier here
I'm 45 and got into IT from the factory floor 15 yrs ago, just as the web was starting and unemployment from manufacturing lay-offs was at its peak. I was always a closet geek and started with a second hand apple 2E that drove my Ex nuts. Someone told me you could make money from it. I decided to do a BSc part time, the nylon factory was not interested in my plans even though they ran a mainframe and leased time to other bussinesses. After using night shift to complete a year of corrospondence maths, I quit. I bought an Acer 256k XT with my severence pay and became a full time uni student and part time taxi driver.
The first thing I noticed about white collar jobs was the boss says please and thank you when you are just doing your job.
I cleaned toilets when I was sixteen, not as much fun as the floor polisher, worked as a brikies labourer, farm hand, fishing trawler, sawmill, nylon mill and a few others by time I was 30. I also had 2 kids during all this. EVERY job I have ever had has it's good and bad bits. If you don't rationalise the bad bits as delayed reward you will be seen as a snotty kid that nobody wants to work with.
I have been in IT for 15 years and was very well paid a few years back. Now my wage has dropped but is still well above the national average. I don't often write code for fun anymore, my latest thing is digital cameras and telescopes simply because I have the cash for the toys. The only way you can possibly endure working a drill press 12hrs a day is to practice the rythym, ignore the clock and travel somewhere else in your head. Incidently that is also how you loose fingers and thus the "foolproof" saftey gaurds.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.