Open Source Software may be drastically cheaper compared with hiring programmers to reinvent the wheel, but that very fact also enables a lot of projects that o

Open Source Software may be drastically cheaper compared with hiring programmers to reinvent the wheel, but that very fact also enables a lot of projects that otherwise wouldn't have happened. For every company that's not hiring 3-4 engineers in favor of just one guy, there may be another 3-4 companies hiring one person instead of not doing a project entirely. This is similar to what happened to the demand for computer skills when computing itself got drastically cheaper: the increase in usage more than made up for the fact that an individual task was cheaper. Now maybe the act of tying disparate open source products together isn't the same sort of programming we did in the past (though it is software engineering). And maybe some day we'll actually finish writing all this software we're working on and it'll be good enough.