Time Till Open Source Alternative

Time Till Open Source Alternative(staltz.com)

2 points by staltz 3 years ago | 4 comments

jqpabc123 3 years ago |

Yes, Open Source is killing the software market --- everything is moving to become a subscription/service.

What this means for users --- you'll pay over and over again for what used to be available for a one time fee.

What this means for developers --- less opportunity to earn a living doing what you love. How do you make money developing Open Source? Short answer --- you don't.

This is all a good thing, right? Right?

simonblack 3 years ago | |

You're wrong in saying that Open Source is leading to everything becoming a Subscription or a Service that will cost you. That's a separate commercial issue for software companies to decide upon for themselves. Microsoft, for example, have progressed along the line: Retail Sales direct to Consumers, Software Bundled with Hardware, Software as Subscription Service.

Open Source means that you can program/compile/produce that software yourself. And that means you are free ("libre") to obtain that software for free ("without cost").

You are correct, more or less, in saying that developers today have less opportunity to earn a living doing programming. But this is merely the constant trend of cottage-industries eventually giving way to large-scale industries. The single independent programmer eventually becomes one of a team, be that a commercial team or an Open Source team, or even both.

Most Open Source developers are engaged in the Programming Industry.

rektide 3 years ago |

Bruce Sterling had a throw-away mention in his 1994 book about tornado chasers Heavy Weather, saying that in this future no one paid for regular software but everyone shelled out (perhaps subscribed even?) to groupware, software that worked together, because it was just too damned much of a pain in the ass to do anything else.

For all the p2p popularity & interest- ipfs, dat, hyper, various blockchains- it feels like there's still very little progress. Even if we take the easy path of building centralized servers, there's few architectures & systems that can help up rapidly develop "multiplayer" software systems.

simonblack 3 years ago |

It won’t happen overnight, it will start out as a poor alternative, but slowly growing to become the robust and cheap ... solution that everyone uses.

That's the perfect definition for "The Innovator's Dilemma", the 1997 book by Clayton M. Christensen: what happened in the hard-drive industry, and other industries, as cheaper alternatives arrived and put the previous 'top-dogs' out of business.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Innovator%27s_Dilemma