Evan,

>>So.. Organization and motivation and talent. I don't see either camp as having a monopoly here...
>
>Let's say (for the sake of argument) that both sides are even on talent, organization and motivation. What about time? A cutting edge company probably can push their guys to do 10-14 hours of work for 6 day per week. If open source can't pay their programmers in the long term, then these guys have to exist on welfare or do it in their spare time. At this point, closed source is ahead of the game.


I'd think you're correct with respect to the time factor though you and I both know that some of our compatriots don't sleep. <g>

It is IMO a very interesting issue. I suppose we'd need some numbers here. For example, Microsoft has, what, 40,000 +/- employees? How many of these are programmers? I wouldn't have a clue but I know there are a lot of support folks. Let's say 10,000? High or low do you think? That would be 400,000 hours per week (all things being equal). With 50 weeks of work per year that would be around 20,000,000 hours per year.

Now.. In any given open source arena, if you were generous and gave them 20 hours per week that would require some 200,000 programmers. (20 * 50 = 1000. 20,000,000 / 1000 = 20,000).

Now, that seems like a lot until you consider that this would represent the entire programming staff of Microsoft.

Let's take the VFP group. How many programmers are there? 20? 10? How much effort would it be for the open source movement to reproducr VFP do you think? I'd bet not to many and I'll be it can get a little scary for some of the Microsoft departments...

The O/S portions of Linux is essentially done for all intents and purposes I suppose.

That's why I think that Kylix on Linux has a real chance to be dominant on that platform.

The next couple of years will be interesting I'd think. <g>