Why do programmers even like the idea of open source? I am not talking about the

Question

Why do programmers even like the idea of open source? I am not talking about the creators of those projects, of course they get fame, but I am talking about the industry in general, why are we so fond of the open source concept when it brings so many bad impact to the industry?

First, projects like wordpress and other CMS, they take away a lot of freelance jobs where clients want a blog or a simple website. Secondly, projects like Rails and other libraries and API's, they put a lot of programmers out of work, and make the demand for programmers smaller, because now with these open source API's, one programmer can do things that 10 programmers used to do. And finally, with open source software such as Notepad++, now people just feel funny when you ask them to buy software.

So, the question is, why do we still like open source if it kind of making us poor? Probably, my life as a programmer would be harder, but at least I can make a living out of it. But now, it's more like machine replacing human, funny thing is, we are creating those "machines" that replace ourselves.

Let's say, if you invented a tool, you don't have to share it, it will still help you and your company. Even without these open source tools, other programmers will live because they still have a job that makes money.

Explanation / Answer

Why do we like commodity hardware?
Intel and Dell stopped me charging for assembling my own computers and making my own PCBs.

High level languages mean I can't bill for 2 weeks work for a simple printer function written in Assembly.

And finally the internet means people can just ask questions for free and someone will answer them rather than having to pay me to write books and teach classes.

I just spent a couple of days installing and learning scipy+numpy+skimage, which means that I managed to write an image processor in a day. That makes me more valuable to my company's shareholders than if I had spent weeks of work going through the maths of all the original papers and then coding everything in C++.

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