Will the trend towards Open Source Software result in lower salaries for IT professionals?

[StormRider]

Just wondering...

Why would companies pay money for work when they could get the work done for free?

Take StarOffice and OpenOffice for example. A company can use that instead of MS Office. People wrote StarOffice and OpenOffice and are giving it away for free. That's like someone offering you free plumbing service. If someone was willing to fix your toilet for free, why would anyone go hire a plumber to fix their toilet?

I like Open Source software. I love Linux. When I was a young undergrad at UMD, they had expensive Sun workstations. So, I usually associate Unix with expensive powerful enginneering machines. And it's so cool that Linux can turn my inexpensive PC into something that looks and behaves just like an expensive engineering workstation.

Well, anyways, the problem with Linux is that I now expect everything to be free in the Linux world. I just can force myself to pay for any Linux type stuff (and that's perfectly fine in the Linux world). But I sometimes wonder if that same sort of mentality will affect companies when they hire people in the future for computer/IT related world. Will they expect salary rates to be basically "free"? Why should I pay you a lot when there are programmers out there that will do things for free?

 

[bizmark]

no, of course not. to use your plumbing analogy -- the toilet might be free, but the plumber will never work for free.

Why should I pay you a lot when there are programmers out there that will do things for free?

NOBODY is willing to do IT work for a business for free. Linux/BSD programmers are doing it as a hobby, not a job. They are doing it to benefit everybody, including themselves. They are not doing it to help a single entity. If they were, they would demand compensation.

If anything, a turn towards open-source software in the commercial world would mean an INCREASE in IT professionals' salaries, since usually open-source software comes with little or no support.

 

[sandorski]

I don't think it will, at least not now. The crash of Internet based companies has probably affected the earning potential of IT professionals more than Open Source can do, at least in the Short/Mid term.

 

[The Dancing Peacock]

what linux is good for is tailoring and customizing these opensource packages to what your company needs. At my work, we run mostly redhat 7.2 and we've customized the kernel to work with our fileservers, graphics cards etc. We have also published some of our open source work on a pretty widely used piece of software. We have programmers and sys admins that work on these things. They are well compensated for the work they do for OUR company. That it gets distributed is the idea behind everything being open source, and benefits the community, and not us. We use it, so they get paid for it.