On Mon, 2003-10-27 at 22:40, Michael Halcrow wrote: > The harsh realization that we must come to is that > programming, as a profession, has been historically inflated. This > may mean fewer jobs for programmers (boooo, hissss) in the future, but > a richer economy, as those displaced programmers put their time and > talents to truly productive use.
Wow. This is truly a great post. To add to the point about inflated value of programmers, I must also say that software as a good has been inflated for years. The commoditization of OSs and Software (ironically brought to pass by Microsoft competing with Linux) is bringing about this realization generally. Software never has existed in a true free market because the try cost of software (on a per-copy basis) can never be computed, only artificially set by the software seller, based on cost of development and the expected number of copies that will be sold. But that just sets some kind of approximate lower bound on the price. Software manufactures, willing to milk the market for all it's worth at the expense of future profit (due to market saturation, etc -- MS's biggest competitor is itself now), set prices well above this point. Since software is artificially scarce, free market forces do not apply, so we have all kinds of economic problems. One could possibly argue that the economic problems we are faced with today could very well have been triggered by repercussions from this artificial market (witness the .com era and bust). To some degree proprietary software prices are driven by the real scarcity of hardware availability. Proof of the market's skewedness, though, is in how MS Office become dominant. For years, MS dumped (well, since the price is artificial we can't prove this) Office onto the market at prices below the Wordperfect's absolute lowest possible price. Since MS had plenty of cash, they ate the loss until Wordperfect died, and then promptly pushed the price back up to where it was before (about 200 to 400 dollars a seat for Office where it is today). By then Wordperfect's market share was so low they couldn't even give their product away. Thus we see in an artificial market how the technically inferior product, which actually wasn't cheaper (for Microsoft to produce) has been pushed upon the world. Anyway. The point is Michael is correct. We are finally seeing some real problems emerging with the proprietary model. Obviously I believe someone is correct in asking for compensation for doing work for someone. The free software model actually enhances and promotes this. I get paid full-time to work on integrating open source building blocks into a custom hardware/software solution. Witness Apple's genius is using open-source software the right way to make money. I predict that OS X (or XI or whatever) will eventually be given away with their hardware, and already the core of OS X is open source (BSD'd. Not quite GPL... :). I don't think I'm still coherent in any way, so I'll go to bed now. Michael > > Of course, we may find that Free Software actually *creates* more jobs > for programmers as this development model entrenches itself. It's > hard to tell at this point exactly what will happen (if you happen to > know, please clue me in, so I can buy some stock :-). Overall, > though, I believe it is safe to say that we will all be better off for > it. > > Mike > > (These opinions represent my own and only my own) > > .___________________________________________________________________. > Michael A. Halcrow <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > Security Software Engineer, IBM Linux Technology Center > GnuPG Fingerprint: 05B5 08A8 713A 64C1 D35D 2371 2D3C FDDA 3EB6 601D > > This statement is either false or a paradox. > > ______________________________________________________________________ > ____________________ > BYU Unix Users Group > http://uug.byu.edu/ > ___________________________________________________________________ > List Info: http://uug.byu.edu/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/uug-list -- Michael Torrie <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> ____________________ BYU Unix Users Group http://uug.byu.edu/ ___________________________________________________________________ List Info: http://uug.byu.edu/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/uug-list
