[jehb]

> I can't for the life of me find a job that pays to write a new framework or some piece of interesting software because opensource completely devalues code.

Could you put some more color around this part? I don't understand the argument you're making here. It sounds like you're arguing that there's not market demand for the thing you'd like to be paid to make because it already exists and that the version that exists is open source. How is that any different than if the thing you'd like to make is under a proprietary license but at a price point you are unable to compete with?

Disclosure: My entire career in the software industry has been at companies who pay people to write software that is made available under open source licenses. Whether or not there is demand for a new thing to be created has proven independent of the license on that thing. We create and support software that meets our customer's needs, give them a path to easily extending functionality with hiring a whole development team, and indemnify them from the risk of consuming potentially insecure, unsupported software in critical production environments. Open source is a software development model, not a business model. Providing customer value is a business model, and it's rather independent of the license underneath.

[pabs3]

Being paid to write open source is the exception rather than the norm and very hard to break into even after decades of voluntary open source contributions.

[kotxig]

> Providing customer value is a business model, and it's rather independent of the license underneath.

Yes, my argument and tl;dr is that flooding the market with free software has created an environment where superior for-profit alternatives (open or not) have no value to the majority, so software developers have got to go much much further to create a sense of value. There is of course intrinsic value to the software being used and it took skill and expertise to produce, it's just the perception of value is near zero due to the abundance of free alternatives and the culture of expectation that it should be free.

===

To support yourself financially when building a new library of some sort, you either require a commercial sponsor (someone who values this as part of a broader intent, thinks they will get kudos, free maintenance and hiring opportunities, but doesn't devalue their own business by open sourcing it), a derivative business from the software (support contracts, saas, book sales, bs enterprise features that should really have been there to begin with), or is run as a charity (donors or you simply just have to make $0 and lap up the praise for doing it out of the kindness of your heart).

The bottom line here is charity. People routinely work on software for no personal gain and people routinely expect all generic software to be free, to the point where a one off $5 per head charge is considered excessive and will never be considered.

If we imagined a world where people did place value on generic software, that is to say people expected to pay $1-$5 for a compiler or a library, that opens a lot of opportunity to individuals to compete and produce higher quality software and would give me the opportunity to work on things that I find interesting and care about.