Future in gtk+ and open source

[nipunreddevil]

Hi,
I have just started with programming in GTK+.I just wondered that whether this endeavour will bear any long term fruits or not.What if after 2 yrs after completing my bachelors of engineering,i get a job where i am forced to work in non open source stuff.
I mean to ask what are the opportunities available for people using only open source stuff.
how many big players like Google.yahoo,Cisc,Oracle,Adobe hire people who know GTK+ in comparison to people who know say .net or Visual Basic.
Seeking general unbiased opinion.
I love open source but know it will take some time developing in India and i want to be a part of that

[bigtomrodney]

I'm not a programmer, so you can take this one with a pinch of salt:

Nokia are using (and own) Qt so you'll probably see better commercial opportunites there in terms of mobile devices. If you're sticking with GTK+, I recently came into contact with Clutter which is from what I gather a combination of GTK+ and OpenGL for rapidly developing rich interfaces. The Moblin project are using this at the moment and I have a feeling that's gonna be a big one.

On the other hand these are all toolkits so I'd imagine good discipline and technique in your more general programming skills would keep you flexible anyway. While you may end up with a lot of experience with GTK+, that same experience will benefit you in using any toolkit. It's not as if GTK+ will be stagnant forever either, you can expect to have to keep up your learning as you go.

[Rubberman]

A good skill to have for GUI development purposes is Qt, used for KDE as well as a lot of high-performance Windows applications in the finanance industry, and in a lot of smart phones (it is FOSS, but owned by Nokia). In any case, for the best jobs with the best pay, focus on difficult but necessary skills such as software design, architecture, distributed computing, middleware, and database. There aren't so many positions for these as there are for .net and vb developers, but there aren't enough skilled engineers for those positions and they pay a lot more. My last position before I went independent was paying me in excess of $120K USD per anum (plus bonus & profit sharing) because I had such skills. If I was only a VB or .NET programmer, my pay would have been half to 2/3 of that at best.

[Cabhan]

Frankly, I think it generally doesn't matter. You will want to know a thing or two about GUI programming in general, but Gtk, Swing, SWT, Qt, etc. are all similar enough that knowing one will make it relatively simple to learn another.

If your question is the general availability of open-source software, much (most?) web development is done on a Linux platform. Most application development is done for Windows (few companies release applications for Linux), but as I said, learning Gtk will give you lots of knowledge that will transfer to Windows GUI programming.