Roy Schestowitz wrote:
Read this...
http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/7859
Chris DiBona of Google on Ballmer's vision of the $100 computer.
Roy
The thing is I agree with Steve in general...but not in the way he
describes.
When looked at the effort, brainpower, and work it takes to make really
good software, people are not paying fair market value.
The thing is, people and businessness know how important good
programming is, and how much well designed information systems save
businesses money.
At the same time, they just don't want to pay for that...so what does
management do? They go overseas to cheap untrained programmers.
They buy soup-to-nuts applications servers that make "anybody" a
programmer. They invent languages like c# to "make it easy" and remove
messy stuff like "pointers" so that lower paid people can "program".
Another beneficiary of this is Microsoft -- which releases /virtual/
versions of real software that fit into the thinking of what a business
person expects software to be (people who understand memetics will grasp
this) and yet this software is completely useless, bug ridden and
unstable -- and mostly, non-functional.
Microsoft is patchwork of business relationships, smoke and mirrors that
is rapidly becoming unglued at the seems as the old coalitions fall
apart and the people who can really do the work no longer need it.
People should be paying more for software. Richard Stallman should be
the richest man in the solar system if programmers were paid by value
added. People who program in information systems should be wealthy,
not companies that sell snake oil "application servers".
We need to get down to the reality of who knows what and what's worth
not.
Do we need to pay more for good software. Hell ya...I need to get paid
a whole lot more!
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