Quote:
Originally Posted by lexico
Why is writing a book any different than writing software? The latter is now mostly done for free (except the boring stuff), and I bet many (most?) writers make very good use of freeware...
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Ummmmm.... no. Not even close. If you look at the contributions to leading open-source projects, you find that the bulk of the contributions come from a small group of people (on any given project, not the same small group across all projects, naturally). A fair fraction of those people are, in fact, professional programmers. And many of those are... this is important now...
paid by their employer
specifically to contribute to the open-source project. Consider the entire Eclipse team, many of the leading Apache committers, and on and on
ad infinitum.
And, even beyond that, open-source projects are nowhere near being the majority of software not even close! Or even the majority of software that is "not boring" (whether for the author or the user). Open source represents less than 1% of the software being written.*
I regret to say that your facts are uncoordinated.
Xenophon
* I can probably turn up some references, with a bit of work.