Name: Anonymous 2010-02-04 13:26
Why should programmers not be rewarded for their work? In every other profession, people are rewarded for their work. Why do people think coding should only be done by amateurs for no reward?
Now at this point, you will all cite the received knowledge that "lots of open source programmers are paid to write open source code", and this is technically true - slashdot told you the truth for once. However what they don't tell you is that the people paid to write open source code only write certain kinds of code - generally systems stuff. Drivers, the kernel and other low level components that are of interest to people using Linux as a server, and the companies that pay linux developers do so because they want to sue it as a server. Why do you think Linux has one of the best kernels of any modern operating system, but by far the worst graphics layer (xorg)? It's because IBM have no interest in making xorg good, but they are interested in making the kernel perform well.
What does this mean? It means you can't make a living writing desktop linux software. How many of the amarok developers get paid to write amarok? None. The result of this is obvious if you've ever tried to sue amarok. Most desktop software on linux is written by programmers in their free time. Those programmers are only able to do that because they have a day job as programmers. What kind of code do they write at their day job? Closed source proprietary code; either in-house business stuff, or web stuff, or stuff for the big software companies (the games companies, people like microsoft, google, apple, oracle, etc).
Now at this point, you will all cite the received knowledge that "lots of open source programmers are paid to write open source code", and this is technically true - slashdot told you the truth for once. However what they don't tell you is that the people paid to write open source code only write certain kinds of code - generally systems stuff. Drivers, the kernel and other low level components that are of interest to people using Linux as a server, and the companies that pay linux developers do so because they want to sue it as a server. Why do you think Linux has one of the best kernels of any modern operating system, but by far the worst graphics layer (xorg)? It's because IBM have no interest in making xorg good, but they are interested in making the kernel perform well.
What does this mean? It means you can't make a living writing desktop linux software. How many of the amarok developers get paid to write amarok? None. The result of this is obvious if you've ever tried to sue amarok. Most desktop software on linux is written by programmers in their free time. Those programmers are only able to do that because they have a day job as programmers. What kind of code do they write at their day job? Closed source proprietary code; either in-house business stuff, or web stuff, or stuff for the big software companies (the games companies, people like microsoft, google, apple, oracle, etc).