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Comment by bazooka_penguin | Hacker News Reader

Does open sourcing everything affect software developers' job prospectives in anyway?

I have mixed feelings about it, it seems to me giving away your code for no return indicates you don't really value it that much. Whether it will have an affect on the industry I don't know.

There was an interesting paper linked on HN a couple of years ago that indicated a lot of the money is disappearing from software sales. The inference was the availability of mysql depresses the revenue from MSSQL, the availability of Linux depresses the revenue from Windows and so on.

> it seems to me giving away your code for no return indicates you don't really value it that much

Well of course it seems that way to you, because you have defined it circularly. Open sourcing code is in no way "giving it away for no return". There is massive return on open sourcing code, from money to improvements in the code and all other manner of things.

I have the opposite perspective from you. I think that closed source code indicates you don't value you it very much. But I understand that perspectives are different and that's okay. But you have made your own leap to not valuing code very much but you should know that the truth for a lot of people is the exact opposite of what you wrote.

I'm somewhat dubious about the financial aspects, sure you can start offering support services but who wants to do technical support for a living, or advertising, or begging via Patreon.

Money is a good proxy for value, I know the customers who paid for my software today are getting some benefit from it, they wouldn't have put their hand in their wallet otherwise. Every time I get an order I get a warm feeling that goes well beyond the financial reward.

On the other hand some of my worst and most needy "customers" have been those using open source or free tools. Their expectations are high and gratitude low.

As I said I do have some open source projects and they have received contributions, when I add it up though it hasn't paid off.

Two reasons to open source: either you're doing it as a hobby and want the world to see it/don't mind sharing it, or you believe/know that open source contributions will be better than what you or your company can do.

Otherwise, open source is terrible for making money. Most clients don't care, but you're giving your competition everything in exchange for nothing.

It's great for society, though.

Just my opinion, and I know a lot of people share it.

> giving away your code for no return

Open source is not actually giving away your code for no money, let alone no return. It's not free as in beer.

If you think about it, software is a tool, and more than that, it's usually a brick in a construction. I wouldn't expect bricks to go up in price.

Software isn't a brick though, it is changing and updating and is a brick that has to be maintained. When you put software bricks together you get a construction that is more powerful than the sum of its parts. It is something inherently valuable in and of itself.

If I need 1000 software bricks I need for my house, you can’t really convince me to pay a premium for each. Especially since I often have alternative bricks.

Psychology plays an important part in how markets work.

In the UK the cost of building materials has been soaring over the last couple of years.

Due to some sort of scarcity, I assume. Software seems to become less scarce as time goes by.

No - building materials in the UK have gone up in price because house prices have gone up and interest rates are low. It's easy to borrow money and the ROI on building is high, so the merchants can charge more for their goods without making a significant dent in the buyers budget.

I think a lot of capacity disappeared after the financial crisis and demand has shot up in the last couple of years due to relaxation of the planning laws.

Artificial scarcity, pretty much.

Yeah bricks do go up in price.

I work as a software developer who's pushed for open sourcing code at our company (unsuccessfully). Premise is that the company's value isn't code, & the idea is that making it open source will produce a more successful product. Generally a software developer's job security correlates with a product's success. It may mean we don't need to hire more people, but I'm not looking to work at a large company, & less people means less mouths to feed

In my own experience I was trying to demonstrate that we didn't need to bastardize the codebase into a million pieces in order to give remote developers only the small part their working on; that we might as well make the code publically available

Basecamp is doing quite well despite open sourcing their framwork Ruby on Rails.

Don't forget, the vast majority of open source is paid for by companies.

This would be more like open sourcing Basecamp itself.

Certainly, but not in the direction I think you're implying. Open source means that you know how to solve all the problems MySQL has solved, even if you don't actually know how to implement a good database engine.

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