After re-reading a few sections of "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" circa 1998, its relevancy describes one of the daily challenges facing software scientists, developers, and programmers as well as the companies that love them. They know all too well that the addition of people to a problem in writing code only expands the problem and timeline exponentially. If we suppose for a moment this still holds true, what then becomes of our economy and our workforce when cloud-based, crowd-sourced (to a greater or lesser degree) application and software development (if we can still call it software) using open source code takes over the world?
The delivery of software by the box being replaced with software by the drink, a drop at a time, and the economy based on an "end" of a project or the delivery of a "version" will sound like a dial tone to those born after 2000 - never heard it before. What does that spreadsheet look like if the platform must not operate with an OS but with browser-like shells to take what we need and leave what we don't. It's not how money is made today.
As we watch with horror as another retailer closes all or some of its doors, we witness the very underpinnings of our economy begin to shape shift. The movement from large to small, many to one - perhaps towards outlets and kiosks as a replacement for big brick and mortar establishments . We may be witnessing the beginning of the end: the decline of the mall and big box stores. Even now our "shopping" experience including the ever shifting act of browsing goes wider and farther than ever and the store is just the place you might touch and feel something but you don't buy it there necessarily. The trend towards picking up locally your new or used goods after a browse around the web will become one of the ways to get your wares. Big hardware stores better become customer service centers really quickly or they will become extinct, too. Anyone look for wallpaper paste lately?
Maybe you stumble upon the beloved item that will soothe the vestigial "immediate gratification" craving - filling you with joy and flooding your body with endorphins, which expire upon the weak strain of the unhappy let down that comes after you unwrap your goodie, as though you're laying on the carpet of a party of which the guests have left and only the streamers and ribbon and booze-stench remain…ah shopping. But I digress.
So, assuming the economics shift what happens to the distribution of wealth? Perhaps Engels correctly, communistically blurted - from each according to his skill, to each according to his need, or something close to that. Now combine the global pressures placed on the distribution of population to the small percentage of people with and the sliver of distributed wealth. Now ask where technology gets "manufactured" and where development of the skilled workers takes place today. Maybe not though.
Let's for a moment take a page from Louis C.K.'s distribution of comedy, pardon my weak pun, which allowed him complete creative control mind you when he produced then distributed via his website a $5.00 DRM-free download of a live one hour show. It took him roughly six weeks start to finish and it would have taken at least six months to work with HBO or ComedyCentral to do much of the same, and they'd have ultimate power over his personal IP. While he took in, purportedly over a million dollars, to say that perhaps he is onto something - the convergence of the diametrically opposed classic distribution model to the initial stated problem of crowd-contributed software development at the edge by, egads...the madding crowds, the unwashed masses...
Then it's fair for everyone perhaps to say that:
1. Not everyone will develop software because they lack the skills, and those who can will.
2. The feared skill diaspora risk factors will cause the wealth to gather the skills where ever they exist.
3. Consumption, like water, will take on the form of the container it's given, and in this case it's bigger and more expansive and full of choices influenced by individuals (socially influenced.)
4. Those who possess non-technical skills will use the tools those cleverer than us developed and perhaps even ask for new tools to distribute wares more effectively - LCK may not be funny to everyone but he's putting the business of content distribution where it needs to be, at least I believe so.
5. And finally, as always, it's the economy, stupid. Or as Navin R. Johnson said in The Jerk, "ah, it's a profit deal!"
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