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More MS, Less Talent In Open Source's Future

Posted by kdawson on from the tell-me-again-why-we're-doing-this-for-nothing dept.

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.'"

10 of 155 comments (clear)

  1. Talent shortage? by RandoX · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Maybe talented coders like to get paid better.

    1. Re:Talent shortage? by wwmedia · · Score: 4, Funny

      u mean not all programmers like to give away their work and answer support questions for free with their open source software?

    2. Re:Talent shortage? by RHSC · · Score: 4, Funny

      I prefer to get paid by the semicolon...just so long as I don't have to code in VB

    3. Re:Talent shortage? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

    4. Re:Talent shortage? by xanadu-xtroot.com · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.
      --
      I'm not a prophet or a stone-age man,
      I'm just a mortal with potential of a super man.
  2. Quantity != Quality by dintech · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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...

  3. Why? by Gotung · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

  4. From TFA by Silver+Sloth · · Score: 4, Funny

    "Microsoft is still trying to work out its strategy," he said. "Ultimately, I think we'll see them embrace open source much more." Now I'm worried.
    --
    init 11 - for when you need that edge.
  5. Huh? by snoyberg · · Score: 4, Insightful

    '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?

    --
    Thank God for evolution.
  6. 25 is about 15 too many. by Organic+Brain+Damage · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.