Joe doesn't sound bitter or anything, does he?

But I don't work in commercial software, I work as a software developer for a commercial oil industry supplier. We love open-source! With the money we can save moving our Windows servers to Linux, and moving our database from Informix to MySQL, we can pay the equivalent of many developers' salaries. And we get excellent support on both products from Red Hat and from MySQL AB.

We very carefully thought about embracing open-source, and it has been great for our business. Our IT costs are continually falling as we move more and more onto OS technologies, leaving more money available for developers' salaries.

Open source is generating lots of these kinds of jobs - developers using open-source inside non-software businesses. The smart and productive programmers change gears and will be in work for a long time to come.

It's a little late for regrets. I was in commercial software for 20 years and have seen this coming for years. Once companies zero out their budget for software, they won't easily restore it. Those of you who went off without thinking about the consequences of your actions and created good software for free (on your own time) have done a great job and you will put a lot of programmers out of work. The jobs that remain are moving to India.

You make an incomplete argument. Many of today's technologies / products / works of art were done because people loved what they were doing. It created a usable product, and the market came afterwords. I hate to think what would have been had Steve Jobs and Woz taken your attitude towards creating something that had no initial guarantee of success. People who write literature (as a magazine type, you should know this) do it because they have to, they can't stop themselves. They don't do it because there is a pre-existing market for what they're doing. Innovation doesn't require a safe area to be born into.

People who like programming computers are often students, technicians or even medical doctors for that matter. What do you think is the easiest way to get started, to learn something?

As long as all programming tools are freely available for Open Source Software, who has the money to pay for Windows and associated high end tools?

Microsoft is digging it's own grave with present policy, despite all freelance whiners. There is no stopping for OSS. If you don't want to do it for free, change trade or keep charging what ever you want! This is a free world, isn't it?