Re^4: Are Perl programmers just easier to deal with?

[CloneArmyCommander]

It is interesting to get the perspective of someone who is a business owner. I am still in college, so I am working from observation from the outside, which is what compelled me to bring my thoughts to Perl Monks.

It gets difficult to find a middle ground. My personal computer, is big bundle of contradiction. I have Linux dual booted to Windows, so I have software on both ends of the spectrum. I do not want to dive into the quality issue, I honestly see both sides as having good quality software. I have had better luck working with open sourcers, which seems to account for most of my support and loyalty to them. I do not mind working with a corporation, and they have their moments that they listen to their customers, after all they are in the business in suply and demand, but sometimes I wonder if it is because the open source world is starting to give them a run for their money.

Oh, by the way, thanks, this is the first intelligent conversation I have had in a long time, hahaha :).

[samizdat]

I'm sort of in the same boat. The profitable parts of my business are all Apache on FreeBSD, and most of the work I do at Sandia is FreeBSD (well, they eant it to run on Solaris, but there are enough BSD boxen around that I can NFS and drive from FreeBSD. Sandia, however, runs its corp nets on Doze XP and some of the users expect data to show up in Doze formats like Excel. (Thanks, Perl+CPAN!) Many of my corporate users for my websites also run Doze -- one site is 96.5% MSIE clients -- and they constantly send me doc files and powerpoints.

I have had great experiences with Doze-based software, too. Corel Draw has no replacement, AFAIK, and I use a lot of PC board and chip software that is only available on PCs unless you want to drop $50K for entry-level stuff. However, I cannot think of *any* doze software company that I have had satisfying contact with since Peter Norton sold out. Part of my business used to be electronics design consulting, and I'd get raped regularly by OrCAD and Keil and other embedded tool vendors.

That said, however, I believe that there is a really strong groundswell, especially in EDA, for open source development. People are tired of being raped for "maintenance" charges that don't buy anything, and OS tools like Eclipse (EDA framework), OpenOffice (Office Productivity) and Blender (3D visualization) plus Perl, Apache, MySQL, and all the other old favorites like FreeBSD and Linux are providing real competition.

Yes, software companies are being forced to listen. They will die if they don't, bluntly. In EDA, a number of people are trying to release proprietary extensions to Eclipse in order to lock in customers like they used to, but the customers are getting wise to it. EDA is such a bleeding-edge business that many people pay the tab because you just have to get the job done, but almost everyone I know is spending their extra brain cycles boning up on the extensibility features of Eclipse, gEDA, and SystemC.

[Anonymous Monk]

Yes, software companies are being forced to listen. They will die if they don't, bluntly.

Yada, yada, yada. I've been hearing these stories how good open source software is and that closed software companies will die for many years. And then they point to the open source successes: Linux, Apache, MySQL, Perl.

But they are the same successes people mentioned in the (late) 1990s. Then people were predicting the "death of closed source companies" as well.

Guess what? It hasn't happened. Open source is (unfortunally) still a small market. There are no large software companies whose business model is creating open source software (MySQL is probably the largest, with just a few hundred employees).

Call me when there are signs that Microsoft, Oracle, SAP or General Electric show some symptoms of dying.

[samizdat]

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.

[samizdat]

I'd also like to point out what you don't see: look at all the application and systems programming work that isn't being done with payware. Were it not for open source, somebody would be making money off of these things. The space of payware is MUCH smaller than the space of all software, and Perl is a big part of that. So's Apache.

The question isn't just 'Are they dying?', but also 'Aren't they growing?'. Considering the size of Microsoft's bankroll, their results show that they are in a very hard fight, and they know it.

[CloneArmyCommander]

I completely agree with dwildesnl. But, I think that you are anylizing things with the wrong state of mind. I do not think it is about the death of open source or open source taking over. I will admit that the money that open source projects have made are not even a drop in the bucket compared to the money that large corporations are raking in.

The biggest part that I see open source playing is bringing about a sense of balance and offering a good alternative to proprietary software.

This is a topic that should be seen with an open mind, I do not think that either way can be labeled "best," but I happen to make my personal choice to support open source, as do (I am certain) many in the perl community.

You have to recognize that open source is a somewhat powerful influence. NASA uses a flavor of Linux, many robotix companies have chosen to use Linux and open source software to drive their robots, many cellphones have even gone to using Linux and open source software. If we take a closer look at the internet, there FreeBSD and Apache have a strong presence.

To be honest, I would never wish for Microsoft or any of the other companies you mensioned to die. The relationship works both ways. Open Source drives proprietary to re-examine their practices, and proprietary drives open source forward to contiue fighting. About a year ago Microsoft contributed to the open soure world by opening the source to an XML parser of theirs. If you are interested, there is a book called "Free for all : how Linux and the free software movement undercut the high-tech titans" by Peter Wayner, and it does an interesting job of showing how open source was born and how it works.