First up, sounds like people need to check out: http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/
and read up on the 'Magic Cauldron' - the economics of open source has been thought about before now...
> You guys are really missing the point..my
> prediction..within 10 years all
> software will be free
Predictions are free - not much else. There is software inside of a lot of hardware you buy, you may not be paying for the software as a separate cost but part of the cost of your new washing machine, dvd player, car etc is software.
> 1/ The internet has opened up a huge market and a global pool of
> programmers..some who work for the love of it
Can see that global pool of programmers working on say a billing system for Telecom for free (or Telecom wanting them to <g>)?
> my work pay me to produce products that cant make money on? The amount
> of free software around to me points to way too much slop and
> lack of accountability in the US academic circles and frankly cant see that lasting
> too much longer.
There has always been free software, some of it good, mostly not. I can see it lasting a long time because it seems to have very little to do with US academic circles...
> > 2/ Tools to produce software are becoming better..
I'm not convinced that the tools are winning the war against complexity. If you used the tools of 10 years ago (Turbo Pascal?) and compared the time in programmer months required to write say a accounting system or commercial game, would it probably take less time to produce a similar product using say D5 but to produce a equilivent product - say a commercial game now would probably take longer overall.
> The solution - write open source software..become the Linus
> of your market and enjoy the fruits of community
I think I would prefer to be the Larry Ellison of my market & be filthy rich <g>
> What I would like would be a job with such lack of accountability as Linus
> obviously enjoyed for years.
I suspect Transmeta probably got millions of dollars of free publicity simply by employing Linus regardless of what he actually did at desk there.
