In the long run, open source is far better for engineers than it is for executive douches. To learn Oracle, you needed a job where you had access to Oracle. Th

In the long run, open source is far better for engineers than it is for executive douches. To learn Oracle, you needed a job where you had access to Oracle. This gave employers a lot of leverage. They could hire young people eager to learn the ropes (and willing to accept a salary that was small compared to their ability to add value). This reduced the leverage of older people, who were in competition with young people willing to work for peanuts to get into the game at all. Now, with options like Postgres, people can learn and use a production-quality database without having to pick up a phone and pull out a credit card. The effect of this is that engineers have more options, and are more aware of how much value they actually add. In the very-long term, this is a wealth transfer from relationship-peddlers with fat stacks (money, capital) to technologists who can actually think and solve problems. It might take a decade, but possibly a century, but it is happening. It's just very slow, and progress is not monotonic.