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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."
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.
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
Bullet proof software? Many people on the OpenBSD source project are paid to work on OpenBSD full-time. Yeah, paying people to write software doesn't work.
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?
Your point, it's like saying we should not have used light bulbs because the candle makers go out of business. It's like someone else said a very narrow-minded and down right stupid way of thinking.
This is not 1984 or Brave New World, things in the real world change and shift. Change is not bad, unless you are an old school conservative but that's another point. If OSS makes better and cheaper software than good for them. However, OSS developers also make money somehow so in the need the total economic effect is none and society gets a better product.
Also, you assume things wont level out however they must somehow since unless OSS developers make money somehow they can't have a computer without which they can't make OSS software. It's a natural check in the system, so some form of steady state will emerge although traditional paid programmers may not be part of it. Too bad for them however things change.
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.
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.