The Cathedral and the Bazaar

This is my first post for OSD600 class in response to the reading "The Cathedral and the Bazaar"

The article written by Eric S. Raymond in regards to his discovery of bazaar style open source development is astonishing by the fact how Linux Torvald single handedly created a market for the world. It is certainly an inspiration as a programmer to see that a single contributor can make such an impact.

However, I am sort of skeptical about the new market emerging with open source.
Will it destroy programming jobs that were once on demand? or Will it continue to expand in the near future providing new opportunities?

After all, open source are contributed by a community of programmers. If open source were to become the next dominant technological trend, wouldn't that ultimately destroy the programming sector in the job market. Although, the concern is irrelevant considering the long branch of various IT expertise demand out there.

Nonetheless, there will certainly be more different jobs available as new technology emerges that professionalize to maintain the open source technology. But the point is, if the open source community were to succeeded with the concept of free distribution of OS and software. Would people still be motivated enough to design a piece of software with only self-satisfaction as reward? Will new comer try to learn software programming knowing that their effort is to design free software and nothing more?

Maybe I am thinking too much about the economic effect of open source. Regardless, open source are always welcome in this world, considering that not everyone in the world can afford a legitimate copy of Microsoft applications. However, the effects I am seeing is that, once you start giving out free things, people will demand more of it in every area beyond software.

Nothing against open source by the way, just some thoughts.