Now that I am truly busy on work projects, more so than I’ve been since those heady dotCom days of yore, I stand in awe of my fellow open-source developers who find the energy and drive to still code after they’ve put in the long hours at their day job. Kudos bars and all that.
That being said, I do find that the drive to work on things has slowed down simply because the plethora of good open-source software for most domains that I am interested in makes it redundant and foolish for me to roll my own. I find most of the code I write now is simply glue code; The old CMS code used WebWork as its MVC framework. I’m starting to use the Entity Engine from OfBiz, which is a mature and robust Java persistence framework similar to CMP, but faster and easier to implement. Persistence frameworks mean never having to write SQL code in your objects, which is a good thing. Templating can be done either through Velocity which I am partial to, or SiteMesh, also from OpenSymphony. There a dozens of other libraries that can be mixed and matched to accomplish the same things I’m doing with little loss in functionality.
It’s to the point now that for a given commercial product, there is an equivalent open-source version that is at least a viable alternative. The biggest difference between the Commercial and OSS versions are that pay software is usually more polished and has better User Interface design than the free version, although that is more a generalization than a rule. As a Software Developer, this trend both excites me and fills me with dread. I love the nature and spirit of OSS, at least I think I understand why it appeals to me. But I also like, no make that love, to get paid large sums of cash to do what I do. I’m not saying that is happening now, but you get the picture. The economics simply don’t add up if everything is free (as in software), yet as I’ve mentioned before, there are OSS projects blooming all over, with good software behind it, and smart developers leading it.
It’s obvious that developers for large projects like Mozilla are basically the 21st Century equivalent of artists with patronage jobs. Michaelangelo couldn’t have finished the Sistine Chapel on a painter’s wage without the help of a DeMedici or a connected aristocrat of that stature and wealth. By that same token, AOL pays the Moz boys and girls to work on Mozilla which in turn helps them to keep the Netscape Browser brand and mindshare alive. For everyone else who does OSS, the only incentive outside of economy is the social aspect: recognition from peers, self-satisfaction, ego, all those good human qualities that are part of a thriving creative body politic. But push this to future, say in 5 years when OSS is reaching its initial phase of maturity, will that drive still be there? Will projects that are mature now actually be better than their commercial counterparts? If so, what does that bode for the Software Development industry in general, when free software is better than commercial software, assuming that it does not keep pace with the OSS movement? Questions to ponder. The landscape (ha! my Siemens pals will get this joke) was very different 5 years ago. I can only see it getting weirder as we go along.
