Without Jobs, Will Open Source Suffer?

darthcamaro writes in with an interview with Markus Rex, Novell's top Linux exec and the former CTO of the Linux Foundation. While some open source vendors see the current economy as a boon to open source, the interview concludes with Rex's speculation on the contrary possibility. "The other thing is in both Europe and the US the rise of the unemployment rate is something that is rather unprecedented... The open source community to a certain degree is dependent on the willingness of people to contribute. We see no indication that anything might change there, but who knows? People need something to live off." Have you thought about scaling back open source work as the economy continues to contract?

Comments

Re:Not Steve

[LingNoi]

lol, like we'd ever need him..

Ridiculous

[Dun Malg]

People need something to live off

This is utterly ridiculous. It's not like work on an open source project is comparable to giving away money, or hand-built widgets. Nobody is going to say "gee, I would normally contribute this code to that open source project, but I'm unemployed, so I'll sell it to buy groceries instead."

Re:Ridiculous

[geminidomino]

This is utterly ridiculous. It's not like work on an open source project is comparable to giving away money, or hand-built widgets. Nobody is going to say "gee, I would normally contribute this code to that open source project, but I'm unemployed, so I'll sell it to buy groceries instead."

No, but they might say "Gee, I would normally write a patch to fix Xorg's gonkulator, but dammit, I have to go search for a job instead."

Re:Ridiculous

[SanityInAnarchy]

Except that contributions to open source projects are both good resume-fodder and a good way to get noticed by potential employers.

I know a job search is hard work, but I'm not sure it's going to take as much time as a fulltime job... meaning that much more time to play with Xorg, or whatever else.

Re:Ridiculous

[Dun Malg]

No, but they might say "Gee, I would normally write a patch to fix Xorg's gonkulator, but dammit, I have to go search for a job instead."

That's the same crap argument that always gets thrown out. Searching for a job isn't something you can reasonably do 16 hours a day, 7 days a week. It takes no appreciably greater amount of the day to look for work than it does to go to work. After you've gone to 3 interviews and sent of 20 more resumes, what are you going to do after 6pm, when most offices are closed? Sit at home for 3 hours and obsessively tune your resume? After every day? Un-fucking-likely.

Re:Ridiculous

[Dun Malg]

I think the point is that when you have "extra" it's not a problem to give things away for free. However, if you can't pay your rent or don't have enough to buy food I don't think your priority is going to be working on something for free. Of course anything that detracts from the "Open Source Rulez Supreme" mantra must be shot down.

"Priority"? What are you talking about? "not being able to pay rent or buy groceries" isn't even an activity. Name the activity that arguably takes priority away from FOSS. "Lookig for a job" is no harder work than having a job, so what is taking up the other 8 hours of waking time?

Re:Ridiculous

[Kjella]

I know a job search is hard work, but I'm not sure it's going to take as much time as a fulltime job

If times are tough, you've been through all the job boards and applied for anything relevant, shaked down all your friends and contacts asking if they know of any job offers, gone to every interview you've been invited to then yes. Keeping up with the daily new offers isn't really that much work, it's not a day's worth of work. "Hitting the pavement" is only good if you want to get a job as burger flipper or shop assistant, anything more serious than and you'll find the application on the web boards. If you got commitments (wife and kids, family, friends, wife's job, home with mortgage) then you can't just go across the country for whatever job might be there.

Also, employers don't want employees way outside their current skillset and normal pay grade. They know as well as you know that this is a stopgap because times are rough and come better times you'll be off to a more relevant position, most likely at another company. The more desperate you get, the less any employer is likely to hire you on those far-out applications. Of course you shouldn't just hit the couch but sometimes just waiting a little bit for reasonable jobs to show up is the right answer. Of course that all depends on what situation you're in, if you don't have a nest egg and need that job NOW, well you do what you gotta do. Even under current circumstances people aren't that desperate though.

Re:Ridiculous

[farrellj]

Until recently, open source software was developed by people FOR THE LOVE OF IT!!!

That you get paid was a bonus! Most open source software still is written by people who like to write software, and more often than not, to fill a need that person had. Linux is such a piece of software. Although I don't know Linus personally, I am pretty sure that if there was suddenly no need for Linux, chances are, he would stop developing it. Sure, he might continue to do it for money...but with his programming and management chops, he could get a job almost anywhere today. IMOHO, of course. :-)

ttyl
          Farrell

Re:Ridiculous

[pleappleappleap]

If anything, I usually write more open source code when I'm out of work. Even when you're putting a lot of effort into finding a job, when you're out of work, you have a lot of extra time on your hands.

Boredom is worse than poverty

[NReitzel]

Were I unemployed, I would still contribute to open source projects. The only thing I think would be worse than being jobless and broke would be being bored, jobless, and broke.

Re:Boredom is worse than poverty

[drinkypoo]

Idk about you, but if I were unemployed - I'd try to work.

Being able to point to your devblog and say "this is the code I've been writing over the last six months of unemployment" looks a lot better than "I've done nothing but write resumes for six months and I'll spend my first month trying to remember what an IDE looks like".

It should flourish.

[Lumpy]

If all those programmers that are unemployed want to keep their skills sharp they better find a project or two to join and keep on coding.

Honestly sitting on the couch for 3 months eating cheetos and playing the Xbox does not make you a useful coder when you finally get another gig. Laid off? go to sourceforge and find something you would like to contribute to, contact the team, and get cracking. Keeps you sharp and you will get spoiled by the no deadline freedom.

Of course not!

[Anonymous Coward]

In Europe, unemployment benefits are good enough that we don't need to worry about starving or even losing net access, and with nothing else to do, contributing to open source projects can't be bad for one's programming career! With big enough contributions, you get a reputation, new contacts and something to reference in your CV.

Re:Of course not!

[Fieryphoenix]

In the United States, unemployment is mandatory insurance, not welfare. Premiums are paid by workers and taken out of their paychecks. When they later become unemployed, they are certainly entitled to the benefit they were paying premiums for.

Re:Not Steve

[ShieldW0lf]

If you make something that is significant, people will always find a way to support you, even if the mechanisms by which they generally give that support are lacking.

If you've already writing OSS, and you've got the capacity to build something significant, are you going to skip it and go work on a dirt farm for a few dollars a day?

Maybe, but I expect the author of that article will be on the dirt farm first.

Re:Not Steve

[wjsteele]

Yep, it confused me too. Perhaps changing the title from "Jobs" to "jobs" would be appropriate here.

Bill

Dubious assumptions?

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Stories like these seem to assume two rather dubious things: (1) that programmers always have a choice between work-for-nothing and work-for-something and (2) that all OSS is produced by volunteers for no money.

The second, we know is partially true, if altruism didn't exist OSS wouldn't work nearly as well; but definitely not wholly true, anybody can rattle off the list of big serious commercial players paying people to build OSS.

The first, though, seems a really weird assumption to make when talking about OMG Depression! conditions. For anybody who primarily works for a living(as opposed to primarily owning or investing) the more or less defining characteristic of bad economic times is low prices or no buyers for your labor. It isn't: "Well, times are hard, so I'm going to start selling the labor I used to give away.", it is "Times are hard, people aren't interested in buying the labor I want to sell."

There will probably be some cases where people who used to work relatively short hours at high wages will now work longer hours at lower wages, thus decreasing their OSS contribution; but I strongly suspect that, for most programmers(and people generally) the whole point of "depression" is that you can't just go and sell the labor you used to give away. If things get really dreadful, fall of the USSR style dreadful, we'll probably see less OSS and more subsistence farming and wood chopping; but garden variety economic slowdown would seem to have the opposite effect.

Cut their own throats, so to speak

[BadAnalogyGuy]

By driving the cost of software to zero, OSS developers have made it difficult for many people to act creatively due to the high cost of development. While OSS developers may make some money developing an open source software package, they have essentially forever undercut anyone who might have also developed something similar. This isn't to say that closed source products are somehow more encouraging of competition, but simply that OSS stakes out the monopoly position as its first step (by pricing everything else out of the picture) whereas closed source companies must work hard to make every sale.

This, I think, is the reason why OSS is generally of poor quality (generally speaking) compared to closed source competition. Whereas OSS is driven by addressing specific needs, closed source must compete on its merits and advantages. This leads to very utilitarian software for OSS (Ubuntu) and much more colorful and creative software for closed source (Apple's OSX).

In fact, there is probably a middle ground that many hardware manufacturers are already taking. By pairing the utility of OSS with the style of closed source, they are able to build very interesting devices that not only look good, but also function well. And at the same time, by focusing on developing products with merit and advantages, these hardware makers are keeping competition alive and engineers employed. So maybe the middle ground is to write closed source software and steal from the unemployed OSS guys.

Re:Cut their own throats, so to speak

[pla]

This, I think, is the reason why OSS is generally of poor quality (generally speaking) compared to closed source competition.

Did you mean that as a troll, or do you sincerely believe that?

Let's move past the "Windows vs Linux" argument first of all, as they each appeal to different types of people, and both have merits and downsides.

First, at the ultra-low-end, where you have Joe Sixpack dependant on one-click do-everything apps, I will agree that closed source has the edge, and for an obvious (IMO) reason - The same people interested in FOSS tend to want more control than such software provides.

At the ultra-techie end, you pretty much have your choices dictated by platform. For serious Windows development, you use Visual Studio (and I write that as someone who does prefer MinGW to Visual Studio, but I won't play dumb); For web development, Adobe has pretty much a hard monopoly (and again, I say that as someone who will not use Adobe dev tools). For the unixy and embedded markets, you either have FOSS or WindRiver (and in that case, FOSS has such a huge edge that WindRiver gave up on their own garbage and now just repackages FOSS tools).

So, let's consider the middle-to-advanced users, those who know they have a choice, but don't necessarily care about ideology, just results. I would of course point out FireFox and ThunderBird as crown jewels of open source; For DRM-unencumbered media players, you only have Open Source choices; For rippers (that don't impose their own DRM), again, pretty much all open source with the notable exception of SlySoft (which only has an edge at the moment because they beat us to the punch on BluRay ripping). For image editing, GIMP has a complicated interface with a steep learning curve - But so does Photoshop. For DAW, I honestly know more engineers using Audacity than Sonar/DP/GB/etc, with the exception that if you need custom hardware or realtime support, you don't have many choices there. For those who know the difference between word processing and text editing, the FOSS Notepad++ has pretty much crushed the competition for the text editor crown. For secure terminal sessions and most tunneling, everyone (in the Windows world) uses PuTTY; For (non-one-click) video format conversion, VirtualDub counts as pretty much the only choice...


So... I don't know that I'd call FOSS better than commercial apps, but in some cases yes, and in most cases comparable.

Unless I can't pay for internet

[internerdj]

FOSS sounds like a great way to keep my skills relevant and honed. It will also help fill in those blank time periods which employers hate. I see you haven't been employed for the last six months. Oh well, I've been searching for a job and working for (this particular) project. Check out some of my work if you'd like, here is the URL...

Without jobs, Open Source will flourish!

[larry bagina]

Every time I've been between jobs, I didn't sit around drinking 40s, eating doritos, and watching tv -- I worked on my own projects (websites and software) and some open source software. But when I spend all day working then come home and deal with dinner, running errands, other life stuf... that doesn't leave much time for working on open source software.

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[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:Not Steve

[RCL]

If you make something that is significant, people will always find a way to support you, even if the mechanisms by which they generally give that support are lacking.

Not really. There's quite a few historical examples of inventors who did not profit from the significant things they invented.

It's not enough to create something "significant", it has to be also useful for people. And frankly speaking, OSS projects way too often pursue the goals of their creators, not their users (take KDE4 as an example).

Who Are You Gonna Hire?

[s31523]

Engineer A who was laid off and did nothing for 3 months except take his unemployment check..

OR

Engineer B who was laid off and did some work on an open source project where he/she learned some new things and kept their skills sharp?

I think the exact opposite would occur, No jobs equals more people who now have the time to jump in.

Re:Asking for $$?

[Eddy Luten]

Happens all the time, just browse a bunch of SF.net projects' homepages. Development always has a cost, regardless of the retail price of the product. This also applies to FOSS.

Re:Plus, it's a great resume item

[MikeBabcock]

And by the same token, bragging that you wrote a bunch of good code that you /can't/ show off because its proprietary isn't nearly as useful as it sounds.

OSS contributions are very valuable because of the open licensing.

Getting code merged into the kernel also shows some specific technical skills and inter-personal work dynamics with other programmers, something worth pointing out at least :-).

Re:Not Steve

[Wisconsingod]

They capitalize EVERY word in the header, it isn't an issue they will change that will help us... Perhaps they should use the proper term of "Employment" instead of "Job"