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

Figure out how to monetize it

[athloi]

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.

Re:Talent shortage?

[Reverend528]

Maybe the talented coders just don't like Java. It's entirely possibly that a shortage of tomcat coders will correspond to a surplus of rails developers.

Google trends seems to agree with this theory