> In part, the open source movement reminds me of students setting internships. You
> work for nothing, in part, for some very good reasons, but also as a form of a
> tryout for commercial employment. If you develop a good reputation within the
> open source movement, you have an entree to a good job in the commercial sector.
>
i am not sure i agree with you entirely. sure, many of the simple user applications built on the X windows system were written by grad students and novice programmers (and X itself came out of academic projects at mit and other places), but in my memory, most open source software (and here i am not differentiating between FSF software and the newer open source efforts) ranging from GNU's sophisticated compilers to larry wall's perl were written by either professionals in the industry or it was written more out of interest, than motivated by the possibility of employment as a result. take eric allman who wrote the complex sendmail program that still manages many email gateways on the internet - i believe he has since founded or joined a company that sells this software as a product, but i doubt he had such employment considerations in mind when he wrote the original code. larry wall, to give another example, was employed (at one of the baby bells if i remember) when he first released perl.
otoh, i can see perhaps what you are hinting at: would it be that many such development efforts are not aimed towards some social change as a goal but fall within the narrower career plans of the individuals and their interests?
counterexamples (to the ones i give above) might be someone like john ousterhout who parlayed his effort to develop the excellent tcl/tk open source language to a significant position at sun (but then again he was already a respected academic figure by that time), linux torvalds who is (or at least was last time i checked) a founder at chip maker transmeta, etc.
--ravi
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------- man is said to be a rational animal. i do not know why he has not been defined as an affective or feeling animal. more often i have seen a cat reason than laugh or weep. perhaps it weeps or laughs inwardly - but then perhaps, also inwardly, the crab resolves equations of the 2nd degree. -- alasdair macintyre.