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

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.