Combatting the: "People want to get paid for their work" argument. Advice?

[apsalyers]

I have recently held one of my first meetings in which the use of open source software was suggested for some tasks. There were some back and forths, but on developer in particular was very outspoken. The dev remarked that he and everyone else in the room payed $50-60---100 thousand dollars for their education, as well as put countless hours into their craft, and would like to be paid for their work.

Surprising to me this stirred up a lot of dust and at least partial agreements with most people in the meeting. Money has that effect. I tried giving the usual explainations regarding open source companies still make revenue, that at that point the conversation was lost.

When this comes up, if this comes up to you, how do you assure your co workers that open source does not deny developers a return on investment for their hard earned time and long spent dollars on degrees and training? How do you convince IT professionals other then admins that open source does not mean an end to paid programmers? Its an irational fear, granted, but at least the rational answers I have are not really working.

[RavenOfOdin]

The dev remarked that he and everyone else in the room payed $50-60---100 thousand dollars for their education, as well as put countless hours into their craft, and would like to be paid for their work.


And a ****load of money has been put into my education, too, but do I want to get paid from the school/college/university that contributed to it? No. I don't in any way expect to be.

I pay the school for my education and not the other way around. . .that argument is just stupid.



Surprising to me this stirred up a lot of dust and at least partial agreements with most people in the meeting. Money has that effect. I tried giving the usual explainations regarding open source companies still make revenue, that at that point the conversation was lost.


Did you try elaborating on how FLOSS companies and developers still make revenue?

For example, take the section of the GPL where it states "You may charge a fee for the physical act of transferring the material. . .and you may at your option offer warranty protection in exchange for a fee."

I tried explaining this to family members about three months ago, when they couldn't understand how Open Source developers got paid, with great success.



When this comes up, if this comes up to you, how do you assure your co workers that open source does not deny developers a return on investment for their hard earned time and long spent dollars on degrees and training? How do you convince IT professionals other then admins that open source does not mean an end to paid programmers? Its an irational fear, granted, but at least the rational answers I have are not really working.

Some people don't code for money.
Some people have another job.
Some people are working on multiple projects and may be employed by a company which still adheres to a more solid investment scheme. (Such as ATI)

Lastly - and this I saw on their website - Comp USA sells SuSE Linux Professional for $99.99 . . .where is the loss of payment there? It is an open source system and available for free if one should so choose, as is its code.

[Virogenesis]

Did you mention how you could take a program and adapt it for company use basicaly like in house but by far cheaper.
Did you mention how jboss got big?
Ddi you mention how you could sell manuals, train those around to use the system?

[steve.horsley]

These days, a lot of FLOSS is written professionally. Red Hat, IBM, Canonical, Novell, loads of others all employ programmers. The companies release the code, but the programmers get paid.

Also, if a government department wants something written for them, or an existing FLOSS software improving, they pay programmers to do it. But it makes sense to let the product be released as FLOSS so others can share in the benefit of a better software package. It's better for the economy in the long term - less effort reinventing the wheel n times over. And it must be better for programmers to be breaking new ground than to be writing yet another proprietary version of something that's been done a thousand times before - me too isn't very exciting.

[Stormy Eyes]

Customization, support, documentation: that's how you turn a profit off of Open Source.

[htinn]

The dev remarked that he and everyone else in the room payed $50-60---100 thousand dollars for their education, as well as put countless hours into their craft, and would like to be paid for their work.

That's smoke and mirrors, man. Developing isn't like pottery or painting where you craft a masterpiece and then stick it in a museum. If you develop, you spend 90% of your time in Q&A/debugging. THAT's what you should be getting paid for, and that has nothing to do with whether you go open source.

EDIT: Maybe I can help people understand this better with a bit of my own experience:

When I worked on closed-source projects, it always struck me as funny that our competitors could reverse-engineer our code in less than a week and have it more or less integrated into their own programs (mostly working). Their products, as a result, were more bug-prone and they could offer their customers no relief. Our products, on the other hand, were the result of our efforts so we could better track down the source of our problems. Going closed-source made absolutely no sense to me.