There are many benefits of open source for non programmers, such as freedom of choice, peer reviewed code, price, lack of built in spyware, open standards and many others. However, while those benefits also apply to programmers, there are some problems of open source for programmers such as
- Not getting payed for work
- Making it more difficult for a small commercial program to make money (as there may be an open source alternative)
- Reducing available jobs for programmers (as open source programmers are donating there time)
- Finally, most programmers would make more money on software then they do on it (as they write it, and get paid for their work). This takes away the advantage of the price of open source applications
Taking these points into account, why do programmers donate to open source? I can't think of any other profession that so freely donates time, and intellectual rights for non-charity purposes. For example, I can understand the computers for African kids scheme (http://www.cfas.org.uk/) as it is a worthy charity scheme, and it makes sense to give away software and hardware to them, as they couldn't afford to buy it otherwise But most users of open source can afford to pay for their software. I've never heard of an "open source" music band, or a book writer that just gives away the text for the book.
Also, many open source programs are of such a high standard that they would able to sell even if they had to be paid for. OpenOffice is in many ways better than Microsoft office, and could probably be sold for $50 and still be used by many people.
Please don't take this as a criticism of open source, as I have been using open source software for a few years now, and found it the lack of closed source standard, cost and extensibility very useful. I just want to understands what drives the programmers, who must spend hundreds of hours developing the software, and getting no monetary reward for it.
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