Get a job, slacker

A couple of months ago I had a chance to talk to Brad Kuhn about the effect of the economic downturn on open source since I've been of the opinion that much of the open source 'revolution' came on the back of economic prosperity. Today, both ZDNet and Yahoo! had articles on the topic of people either burning out or having to work for a living at places that frown upon OS development on the job. Even Nokia requested that Jarkko not work on Perl recently as everyone is concentrating on the bottom-line. No surprise there. So, when you have 8 or so hours a day for work, 8 hours for sleep [ theoretically ], 1 hour for getting to and from work, and 2 hours for other various things, it doesn't leave much time for other things during the week. So, unless you have a sugardaddy, working sucks but eating and the comforts money can buy are good.

One of the most important changes in the landscape of free software since 1990 is academia changing from a relatively uninhibited research environment to being extensions of corporate R&D labs. This change, combined with businesses tightening the focus for employees leaves little room for open source development on paid time. Raphael Manfriedi is a most recent example of this trend of people who have less time to give to open source projects and have opted to spend it on having a life instead. There are quite a few around the Perl community who have just silently drifted away in the last year or two as well.

I don't think this means dire consequences for open source software but it will mean a shift in how it gets developed and by whom. Of course, smart open source advocates would look at this trend and attempt to find a way to bring the two poles of software polarity to a more equatorial region but as long as one side has the economic power and the other side has nothing but greasy long hair and lofty ideals there isn't much hope for that ever coming to fruition.