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Comment by RcouF1uZ4gsC | Hacker News Reader

You don't see CEO's being CEO's in their free time. Nor do you see sales people selling stuff just for the fun of it. With open source, developers will spend time and effort building very valuable stuff for free. This perpetuates the perception that programmers like programming so much they would do it as long as their living expenses are met.

I honestly think open source has depressed the wages of programmers. Linux probably has generated billions of dollars of value, but it has not really accrued to the programmers. In addition, open source allows companies to get very valuable intellectual property without having to write it themselves or buy it from someone. Basically it devalues the cost of software and there the value of programmers.

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>You don't see CEO's being CEO's in their free time.

Every single successful business leader I know[1] is a leader at more than just their business. They also sit on charity boards, sit near the top of their social circles etc.

We as devs have to get over this adversarial relationship with other departments. Sales people, business people, accounting, etc. aren't really that different than engineering.

[1]: It's frustrating to me that "CEO" seems to have morphed into a generic term that means "business leader".

> Nor do you see sales people selling stuff just for the fun of it.

Do you hang out with many sales people? In my experience, it's a very personality-driven field and they certainly do at least act like sales people outside of work, even if not literally selling a product or service for money.

Exactly, I knew a sales guy at a former start-up who, when not selling for our company, was off selling watches or hustling something else. He lived and breathed sales in his free time, like an open source programmer lives and breathes programming in his free time.

> I honestly think open source has depressed the wages of programmers.

I strongly disagree. Linux and many other amazing open source projects have helped build a tremendous amount of software products leading to the incredibly high demand for tech workers we see today. Good open source software lets smaller players enter the game, standing on the shoulders of giants. See: Rails

I think this is analogous to the "lump of labour" fallacy. You argue there is less demand for software engineering because lots of software is available as open source, but actually there is more demand because this enables a wider range of software to be made in a cost effective way.

> You don't see CEO's being CEO's in their free time.

Of, say, nonprofit labor-of-love side projects, which they sometimes end up leaving their for-profit CEO gig for, sure I do.

It's interesting; in the past companies were afraid of open source because some of it had no direct support, you couldn't yell at someone if something goes wrong, and "how can you trust something you just downloaded from the internet?"

Now I see private and government organizations mandating the use of open source because it's mostly functional and most importantly, it's free (as in beer).

I do see sales people doing sales in their free time, though. The best ones in my company always seem to be at parties and events with potential clients. They make it look fun!

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