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.'"

Comments

Talent shortage?

[RandoX]

Maybe talented coders like to get paid better.

Re:Talent shortage?

[Anonymous Coward]

Exactly. Unfortunately, support and consulting are arguably the least desirable way to make money in this sort of industry. Ideally, you'd sell product and get only positive feedback to improve it. No support. No dumb questions. No issues.

Companies that make money from support contracts are, in my opinion, doing the least favorable work. It's certainly not sexy and for every dollar you earn, you have to work an amount directly proportional to that. There's not much concept of exponential growth. In other words, your income per hour flattens out much faster than with a product-based model.

Re:Talent shortage?

[xanadu-xtroot.com]

not all open source is derived from hobby work ya know

Perhaps, but you're missing his point. Here's another example:

• Wake up around 6 am. Eat, get dressed, and get physched up for the fun fun hour plus drive via major congested roads to get to work by 9am. That pre-leave time also includes helping get my Son ready for School (breakfast, persistant reminders that he's running late, etc.).
• Work 'till 5pm (usually closer to 6 pm).
• Fun fun hour plus drive home. Home around 7 pm.
• Eat dinner, help Son with homework, spend a bit of time with him before his bed time.
• Spend sometime with Wife and un-wind a bit (and "un-wind", if you catch my drift...)
• Shower, go over meeting notes, maybe catch the the earlier late news).
• 10pm Head to bed.

Where in there am I supposed to find time to sit in front of my machine spending hours debugging code for an OSS project? I'm not saying that I don't contribute, once in a while I have sometime on weekends to submit a bug report (with some same code usually - but not always), or something small like that, but by far and large, us "older" (I'm only 34, but...), "Family Guys" simply don't have the time the younger people (in High School or College) do.

That was his point, I think.

Re:Talent shortage?

[RHSC]

Getting paid by the parenthesis while coding LISP is good too

Re:Talent shortage?

[dvice_null]

> Where in there am I supposed to find time to sit in front of my machine spending hours debugging code for an OSS project?

"We" have the same amount of time what everyone else has. It is just how we want to spent it.

For example I moved to very close to my current work place when I started working there. It takes about 10 minutes for me to get to work and I don't even have to use a car for that. I save probably 10 hours every week compared to you. That is something like 500 hours every year (+ I save a lot of environment and money at the same time).

I like to think that my skills are too valuable to be wasted in traffic jams every day. I would ever turn down a job, if I couldn't move close enough to it. You obviously have different priorities, which are probably better than mine. But you really can't claim that you would have less time than anyone else. (I also have a wife, child, job and I spent my free time on Slashdot and with open source projects.)

Re:Talent shortage?

[Reverend528]

there's nothing in gnu saying you can't indirectly make money from software

There's nothing in the GPL saying you can't directly make money from software.

Quantity != Quality

[dintech]

Tomcat is an excellent product and a gem of the open source community. Just because there are 'only' 25 core developers working on it doesn't make it inferior in any of the other offerings out there. I'm not sure throwing more developers at it would necessarily make it better. See, Mythical Man Month for details...

Why?

[Gotung]

Why does an open source project magically need more programmers because it has become popular? What's wrong with the 25 guys that have obviously been doing a kick-ass job with Tomcat? Throwing more bodies at it will just lead to bloatware.

Re:Why?

[ByOhTek]

I think they were stating it's size and complexity as the rational, not the popularity.

Still, yes there are 25 core contributors to Tomcat, but what is the total contributor size in a per-mont/per-year breakdown for the server.

And what percentage of the updates are being done by the core developers? If the proporition of the development done by the core team is half of what it was the year before, at any given point, but about the same absolute amount of work - then the development on the project is still growing exponentially, even if the core team remains the same size.

Good use of resources?

[MikeFM]

If you can accomplish great things with a few core programmers that is called being effecient. Adding more programmers to a project usually makes it worse rather than better. Open source allows many developers to make minor changes, as they have need to, but doesn't change the fact that only a few core programmers are needed for most projects.

I don't see the number of open source programmers shrinking at all. If anything, I expect to see many new projects taking shape and a few catching fire and shaking up the industry. It's better for many small projects to be seeded so that a few can grow into new major projects. There'd be no point in adding more and more developers to existing projects.

Number of maintainers falls as project ages

[xant]

High-quality products general stay flat or lose developers over time without losing any quality. I have no idea whether tomcat is a high-quality product or not, but the core of it probably requires very little maintenance now, leaving the "core" developer circle free to work on edge features. There are an unlimited number of those for any given project, but the urgency of those edges falls off rapidly as a project ages, so it's rarely the case that a project needs to grow in developers just because it's getting older. Such projects usually split into separate projects with their own functionality core.

Also, it's ridiculous to extrapolate this process and make a statement about all open source. Developers are rarely destroyed, converting their energy into entropy. Instead, they are simply attracted to new products that need developers.

Finally, the talented open source developers pool will only grow, as it always has. If Microsoft is hiring people to work on open source, then those people will be new talented open source developers.

I don't see it

[Wylfing]

First: who the F cares about announcements from Microsoft regarding open source projects, unless they are actually contributing.

OK, that out of the way, I can't see how a shortage in one project is a shortage overall. OS is about coders scratching an itch. I have contributed to projects but only when it was something that impacted me personally, and I wanted to see it fixed in a hurry. If the number of users of a project grows astronomically, that's great, but it has no bearing on how many coders participate if nobody feels an "itch" they need to scratch. Maybe the software is good enough for end users, and they feel fine about it.

Those coders aren't "gone." They're just off scratching some other itch, is all.

Huh?

[snoyberg]

'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 don't get it. There's an open source project run by 25 or so people that's had "astronomical" growth, but since they aren't bringing in new people there's a lack of talent? If they're doing well with those 25, why does the team have to grow?

Re:Figure out how to monetize it

[Anonymous Coward]

Uh, the 90's is calling and asking for their FUD back.

25 is about 15 too many.

[Organic Brain Damage]

The assumption that a bigger team is an indicator of health is insane. Large teams in software development spend most of their time NOT WRITING CODE and NOT DEBUGGING CODE. They spend their time in meetings trying to figure out how to get 25 people or 50 people to all work together. If you have a really big job, like making a modern spreadsheet product, your best bet is to figure out how to partition it into a series of jobs that can be handled more or less independently by separate 5 person teams.

Okay, time for the car anology

[zappepcs]

How many automobile manufacturers were there at the beginning of the 20th century? How many do we have now? Since the number of manufacturers has changed little at all, or even shrunk, can we assume that even with astronomical growth in the use of automobiles, that there is something wrong with the automotive industry?

While that doesn't quite fit perfectly, I think it makes a point. If your 25 coders are putting out code good enough for astronomical use growth, then no more coders are needed. Every OSS project does NOT have to turn into a MS look alike to be successful. I think the author needs to re-evaluate their definition of success here. The hummer vehicles are successful as business goes, but there is not one in every driveway in North America yet. I have some very successful code, and there are 3 users total. It hums along nicely, 24/7 doing it's thing and all the end users are happy. It does not have astronomical growth, but it is SUCCESSFUL.

Why does F/OSS HAVE to compete with MS? That's not really rhetorical. For most of what I do, OO is absolutely great. I have no need to run and load MS Office. To me, OO is successful. I don't have to drive a Silver Ghost to have a great car. Tomcat and Apache are very successful at what they do because (IMO) MS sucked at that job and offered no real competition.

MP3 players are a successful market... not because of the superior sound quality, or because they were made by MS, but because they do their intended job very well. Some better than others, but all do the job. In the software world, it seems rare that there are more than two options for a given product precisely because of MS (not counting Mac products). If you only had a choice between an H1 hummer and a Mitsubishi Galant, or a BMW motorocycle... which would you drive?

The insistence that software must be like MS is at best absurd, and at worse, it's the worst thing that could happen to the F/OSS software industry.

Re:Figure out how to monetize it

[JamesP]

Fact: Programmers need money to survive and are generally underpaid.
Fact: People can work only 40-60 hours a week without burning out and writing crap code.
Fact: Programmers have lives outside of the code.

For Open Source to survive, it's going to have to figure out how to compete in a market economy.
Part of that means making better code, since some OSS projects (OpenOffice) are total garbage full of bugs.
Part of it means a path by which the average OSS application can monetize itself and pay its developers.

Maybe SourceForge needs to distribute profit from its AdSense earnings, I dunno. Funny...

Most places I see the kind of problems these 'facts' show are closed-source shops.

Oh yeah, another 'fact' for you. Open Source projects kicks closed-source projects in the groin in software best practices, construction techniques, usage of tools, etc, etc

Tomcat?

[etnu]

People who use Tomcat tend to be enterprisey types (which perhaps goes without saying; using Java to solve web problems is like using a chainsaw to shave), so it's no surprise that few of them are willing / able to contribute to the project. The kind of domain knowledge required to create an http server and to do the wiring necessary to make things easily configurable is pretty far removed from the typical day to day work of these engineers. I think this is kind of true for most open source projects. The free spirited "hacker" types who want to work on open source projects (write code without being paid? crazy!) tend to be the types of people more interested in algorithms and data structures than they are with worrying about the best way to implement GOF stuff.

Tomcat sucks

[toadlife]

It's developers who slobber all over tomcat. If they actually had to look after the abomination that is tomcat every day, they might shoot themselves for subjecting their customers to such madness.

As soon as you put tomcat under any significant load, the wheels start to fall off and the tweaking sessions start. I spent a frikin month trying to figure out why the tomcat app was not releasing threads and subsequently dying after a week or so of operating. It turned out it was a tomcat bug. Since java outputs the most useless error logs in the history of computing (unless you're a java programmer!), trying to figure out what was happening was virtually impossible. The vendor in this case was equally clueless and didn';t ever realize that the version of tomcat they shipped was causing the problem.

I recently noticed that in one of the tomcat error logs on one of our servers was logging 50MB worth of errors every day. It was the same error over and over. I put in a support ticket to the vendor asking them what the error meant. They said it was "normal" and to ignore it. Translation: Since your application seems to be working, and we don't know offhand what it means, we're going to lie to you and say that it's normal. Great! So I get to sift through 20,000 lines of nothing to find actual errors, and as a bonus I get to archive 50MB of the same nothing every day.

Another tomcat app we have pukes all over itself any time the connection to the database server gets interrupted. This doesn't happen often, but when it does, it's annoying. Other client/server based apps don't do this. Why does tomcat? Maybe it's just the app in this case.

Tomcat sucks.

- A Sysadmin