Archive of UserLand's first discussion group, started October 5, 1998.

My open source dilemma

Author:Eric Kidd
Posted:8/15/2000; 6:52:06 PM
Topic:scriptingNews outline for 8/15/2000
Msg #:19739 (In response to 19721)
Prev/Next:19738 / 19740

Dave writes:

More evidence that the open source bubble has burst.

Well, I never paid much attention to the analysts anyway. :-) They get paid to have lots of opinions, and sometimes the quality suffers.

On a more personal note, I've been wrestling with two aspects of open source:

Can you imagine a musician who wants to make money, but also wants Napster to be legal, somehow? It's certainly not an easy dilemma for me to resolve.

I've been spending the past year wrestling with these issues, and I've reached a tentative conclusion: It is possible to make a very respectable living as a consultant who develops open source software. And open source software is a very effective way to attract new consulting business.

So if you're a programmer, you want to make money, and you don't want to work as a consultant, open source may have nothing to offer you.

But if you do want to spend your time working one-on-one with a few individual users, you can build some great relationships and make plenty of money.

So open source may not influence whether programmers make money. But it certainly can affect how they go about it.

Does anyone else have any contrasting viewpoints?

Cheers,
Eric

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