Sunday, April 29, 2007

Open source is not collectively destructive

I read Nicholas Carr's post, claiming work on open source is "collectively destructive":
"Because skills in open source programming are increasingly necessary to enhance the potential career prospects of individual programmers, individual programmers have strong motivations to join in - and as more programmers join in, the incentive for each individual programmer to participate becomes ever stronger.
At the same time, the total amount of money that goes to programmers falls as open source is adopted by more companies. Individual programmers, in other words, have selfish motives to engage in collectively destructive behavior."

In other words, developing tools that make development faster and cheaper is "collectively destructive".
In days past writing a web site required a great skill, now every kid can do it, therefor the amount of money that goes to web site makers fell down. In the past you needed a guru to build drop-down menus, now everyone with minimal knowledge of VB can do it.
Just imagine the collective damage done by the people that came up with RAD tools or HTML editors - but those things had nothing to do with OSS.

No comments: