used to envision myself coding for the rest. Of. My. Life. many times I thought I had it all figured out. And nevertheless, experience suggests that preferences, trends and prospects always change. The industry nowadays is dynamic, volatile, and ever-changing. Thus, predictions that are long-term are utterly silly.

I have neither stopped coding, nor began to neglect purely technical things, but I refuse to ‘reinvent the wheel’ so to speak. Apart from packaged (often closed-source) applications that are out there mimicking each other and achieving virtually the same thing, one can turn to Sourceforge and see that not many project code is being re-used, let alone used (downloaded and run). There is a certain exhaustion in the market due to saturation, as well as the ability to duplicate good software for free. That’s why I advocate Free software, albeit not at the same level of capacity that equates to activism per se.

I content that companies which ignore Open Source will not survice. Let’s take Opera for example. Opera needs to open up in order to attract enthusiastic volunteers (for plugins & testing, among other contributions). Only then will it match Firefox. Internet Explorer is all about monopoly abuse, so the same rules don’t apply. It does, however, come to show that proprietary software evolves slowly and often plays catch-up.

Maintenance and support will soon exceed programming and development in terms of capacity. Systems administration and architecture are the next big wave. “Open Source” becomes more of a vernacular term whilst hordes of programmers will stampede toward that development paradigm. Wither your right to survive in your career? Why? Better evolve; sooner rather than later.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 8th, 2006 at 11:30 am and is filed under Open Source. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.