Where would the software industry go?

[zba78]

No. It's hard to predict the future, but I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that there will absolutely never be a completely open-source software economy all over the world.

I certainly hope so otherwise that degree in Software Engineering was a complete waste of time in terms of career. As much as I love open source, source code alone won't feed my beloved kids.

[techieMoe]

I certainly hope so otherwise that degree in Software Engineering was a complete waste of time in terms of career. As much as I love open source, source code alone won't feed my beloved kids.

Mmmm... binary burgers.

[stubbe]

if you work hard career aren't really hard to get. Well, my parents always think designers would get nothing, simply the job wouldn't sufficient to fill life. But here I am, am I?

What I see is that, if my "what ifs" are turn out right, sure software engineers would still have careers, but more like those like full timers in canonical, government or high profile institutes. Not building end user consumer products like boxed sets. It would be a full 100% self satisfying/idealism work on that area.

I prefer opensource softwares, not just because they're free, but they're also great simply because they just trying to be a good software. In short, I love their idealism. While commercials, altho they're good, but there're some economics background behind it. Like copy protections, or patches that could actually fixed before they release the final retail versions.

I liked opensource softwares because they pushed the commercials to work harder for not being replaced by FOSS, that would make my money worth even more. Now they have competitors, with far cheaper price, but this also would make coders suffers more.

in gaming area, U3 engine already shows its dominance, and also tons of FOSS engines out there. I would guess someday programmers in games would be more of modifying codes and scripting coders, not building a whole engine from scratch anymore. But who knows, when Id was dominant with quake engine back then, epic came out with unreal engine. And then the dominance was taken by epic.

Every situations have both positive and negative impact, on certain people. There's no exception with opensource.