More MS, Less Talent In Open Source's Future 155
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.'"
Talent shortage? (Score:5, Insightful)
Quantity != Quality (Score:5, Insightful)
Why? (Score:5, Insightful)
Good use of resources? (Score:3, Insightful)
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 (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:Why? (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
I don't see it (Score:4, Insightful)
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? (Score:5, Insightful)
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 (Score:1, Insightful)
25 is about 15 too many. (Score:5, Insightful)
Okay, time for the car anology (Score:3, Insightful)
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 (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
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? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Talent shortage? (Score:5, Insightful)
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? (Score:5, Insightful)
Perhaps, but you're missing his point. Here's another example:
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? (Score:2, Insightful)
Comment removed (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Talent shortage? (Score:4, Insightful)
"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? (Score:3, Insightful)
There's nothing in the GPL saying you can't directly make money from software.