What you say is true, of course. However, that doesn't invalidate what I am saying. Many niches are being overrun by open source. Eclipse, as I mentioned, is one very new strong contender in the EDA framework arena, and it's giving Synopsis and Cadence fits as they reposition to try to hold on to their captives. gcc is another. How many closed-source C compilers compete with gcc? A lot fewer than used to!

While it is true that Microsoft shows no signs of dying, we are irritating the dinosaur immensely. They are being forced to work for their money as opposed to stealing from corporate, government and consumer babes.

I am seeing signs of growth in a very significant trend: programmers being paid to work specifically on open source development. For many years, companies like Yahoo and Walnut Creek CDROM paid developers to work specifically on FreeBSD. This trend is widening, to the point where I have now seen several examples of senior programmers with reputations (Poul Henning-Kemp, for example) collecting money from the community to work on projects. Another very healthy sign is that Ton Roosendaal succeeded in getting the community to help him financially to release Blender.

I believe the thing to watch for is userland and user-corp contributions to projects, not old-style software companies. MySQL is a formalized company, but there are other projects which are starting to look for and get money to develop.

In reply to Re^7: Are Perl programmers just easier to deal with? by samizdat
in thread Are Perl programmers just easier to deal with? by CloneArmyCommander

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.