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More MS, Less Talent In Open Source's Future
alphadogg writes "The open source industry in 2008 will be marked by more news out of Microsoft, IBM, Oracle and other big IT vendors, less start-up funding, more M&A activity, and an increasingly serious talent shortage, according to Raven Zachary, open source research director for The 451 Group. One example of the talent shortage will be people with expertise in the Tomcat open source Java servlet middleware from the Apache Foundation. 'There are 25 or so core contributors to that project,' Zachary said. 'Over the past four or five years that number has stayed virtually [unchanged]... but the growth of Tomcat has been astronomical.'"
I beg to differ.
I tried to install Tomcat the other day for a rehosting consulting job I was tasked with.
The initial part of the install went fine, though the documentation seems to be written by someone from another planet. Very strange verb tenses, grammar, poor train of thought throughout (very jumpy).
Anyway, after I got Tomcat up and running, I realized I needed a connector to hook it into Apache. The docs were kind of sketchy on this (yes, they brought it up, but not in an organized, linear manner. It's like the docs are a stream of consciousness effort).
So I go to install the jakarta connector (after spending a half hour trying to figure out which version is the correct version, non-obsolete, appropriate for load-balancing, etc.) and the next thing I know: hot grits are down the front of my pants.
there's nothing in gnu saying you can't indirectly make money from software, you just can't redistribute code that is derived from gnu code in a propietary way. Canonical I hear makes about 50 million a year through support and indirect revenue sources from Ubuntu
Sigs are too short to say anything truly profound so read the above post instead.
with an alexa rank of 152 and involved in running a site of comparable size that uses adsense i estimate sourceforge makes 2,000 -> 3,000 $ a day from adsense
As of apache 2.2(web server, not tomcat) mod_jk is obsolete and this has gotten a whole lot easier. Take a look at mod_proxy_ajp.
/examples/ ajp://localhost:8009/jsp-examples/"
It's now just one simple proxy_ajp.conf file. Plenty of options for advanced configuration, but a simple configuration could be done in one line like "ProxyPass
"If they have both, tell them we use Linux. And if they have that, tell them the computers are down." -Dave Chapelle
That's the typical opensource situation where whom you need is NOT a core developer.
25 developers are a pretty good team to constantly write, re-write and improve the inner workings of tom-cat. In fact, there are a lot of commercial project that don't have that much developer 100% dedicated to the project. And as GP poster pointed out : "Mythical Man-month" explains us why this team doesn't need to grow much more because of the added inter-communication and training of newcomers overhead.
What a lot of newcomers into the OSS world fail to realise, is that there is a lot beside "writing code" that is important for an OSS project to be useful. There's, for example, a very strong need for artist to make the visuals (UI design, themes, other graphics) in order to avoid having the OSS project look like some 10 year old ass-ugly Athena interface with a cryptic UI based on a non obvious metaphor.
And, like in your case, projects also needs people with good writing skills, to write nice documentation, specification, HOW-TOs, and other guides, because frankly there are a lot of OSS projects out there that are technical marvel from a technological point of view but whose documentation consist mainly of a a big dump of code comments and function names and where, in fine, the old classic formula "Google + {error message} = posts in newsgroups" is the only way to get decent help.
People usually fail to realise it. For them Open-Source mostly remind them of complex C/C++-code and they think that GPL is only for programmer good at writing code. And thus a lot of people aren't motivated to contact a project and start helping because they think they don't have the necessary coding skills. Whereas in fact, even with no competences at all in programming, they could be critically important with their artistic, litteracy, or other skills. (Even things like helping organising appearances of the project at major Meetings and Expo can help because it bring attention to the project, and that requires skill that are neither coding nor artistic).
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I like to get paid by leading whitespace -- syou know, paces and tabs (with tabs counting as at least 4 spaces). But then again, I'm a Python programmer.
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so don't use GLPv3 . There are plenty of other open source licenses . It's not because the FSF makes a new one that you have to use that. There is no good or bad license in there , it just depends on your needs . I don't think there's a talent shortage , it's more like a shortage of new ideas . Basically , if you think of an application you could use , there's a good chance it already exists . And it's a lot more fun working on something you helped create , than on improving something someone else wrote .
Slipping shoelaces ?
Because that is how management thinks. I'll break It out for you.
Management types want more people to manage because it gives them a means to argue they deserve more money. Their management wants to see more money first. SO if your product is successful and growing, your management expects to be able to bring on more workers so they can be considered more important and worth more money. Think of it as HR bloat just like feature bloat in an application.
Since these "analysis" articles are done by people who are trained in, experienced in, or familiar with that model that is what they expect of everything. It's the notion that success brings growth. They are blissfully ignorant of the small world concepts, or how real work gets done, or how software is different from building a Model T, and only see the "business" side - especially since that is what pays their salary.
My Suburban burns less gasoline than your Prius.