Burak Ozdemir ’s Blog » Blog Archive » Do jobs in open source programming suck?

Recent CNN Money survey pointed out interesting results that while expert users of .NET get higher initial salaries and hefty annual increments that can go up to 15%, open source programmers get only modest hike of just two percent. A debate has been raging in the IT community as to why do .NET programmers get better salary than the open source programmers.

The debate, intentionally or unintentionally, seems to be working in favor of Microsoft, who obviously has vested interest in promoting ASP.NET. RedHat, Zope, and IBM are known as excellent paymasters to open source programmers and scout for talented programmers from open source community.

The programmer community working on .NET platforms argues that it is the people who actually build the product, get the moolah and the pay is directly proportional to the difficulty of the task. The language and working styles under both the situation is different. In an open source environment, one has to work only on the intent and not actual programming.

Further apart from demand supply equation too that determines the salary levels, the technicality of job in designing the program is much higher than working on pre-designed set of modules. On a complex project, a programmer designing the actual program is more prone to “not being able to leave concerns at work” and have bad nights.

Another factor contributing to lower salaries is that open source program tends to spread the knowledge among larger number of programmers, hence increased competition and lower salaries.

It is true that even if your open source project is successful, you may make less money than that made in close-source and hence lower remuneration of its programmers. In fact, in freelancing, open source programmers do not make money on the modules they make but by offering technical support or helping customers install the program, which is not as remunerative at present.

On the other hand, programmers working on open source platform argue that having more responsibility need not necessarily mean that your mind is more occupied.

It is also argued, that programmers working on open source are more motivated as they contribute to open source to impress peers or to bolster his skills, and reputation. A coder contributes to open source without any immediate economic consideration.

Open source programming in fact creates a community of like minded programmers and develops a great sense of belonging and working amongst large community of developers ready to help you out in case you face any problem.

It has also contributed significantly to change the economics of IT market as companies like IBM have been able to cut costs they have to pay to software vendors. This is a selfless service as the revenue saved by these companies does not flow back to the programmers.

Many such companies are even known to fund the open source programs. Generally such efforts are misrepresented as being in programming community’s interest while actual intent is to get free software for their products. IBM, HP, Computer Associates, Intel, AMD have contributed significantly in development of Linux. OpenOffice has been substantially funded by Sun Microsystems. RedHat, Zope, and IBM are known as excellent paymasters to open source programmers and scout for such talented programmers from open source community.

Open source programmers have successfully been able to win most price-based bidding wars against proprietary software vendors while keeping their profit margins more than high enough to support themselves adequately.

The debate, intentionally or unintentionally, seems to be working in favor of Microsoft, who obviously has vested interest in promoting ASP.NET. This debate attracts larger programming community in working on close-source programs and hence promoting the popularity of Microsoft’s products. On the other hand, acceptance of free open source software would directly hit its bottom-line. After all, the specter of open source programming gaining ground has direct impact on monopoly value of Microsoft.

Personally speaking, I would advocate open source programs as it encourages new ideas, innovation and diffuses knowledge among broader set of programmers. In fact, as the open source programming would gain popularity, it is expected that the “shrouded” software would become an exception.

The programming market is relatively young and is yet shaping up. Many leading IT companies are known to be using open source communities as a hunting ground for real talent. This trend, as it grows further, would contribute significantly to bridge up the salary differential.

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