Some programmers worry that the transition to open source will abolish or devalue their jobs. This starts with the market value of software going to zero because of all the free source code out there. Use value alone doesn't attract enough consumers to support software development. The commercial software industry collapses.
Programmers starve or leave the field.
We have already observed a number of sufficient reasons this won't happen, starting with the fact that most developers' salaries don't depend on software sale value in the first place. For purposes of examining the software market itself, it will be helpful to sort kinds of software by the degree of completeness which the service they offer is describable by open technical standards, which is well correlated with how commoditized the underlying service has become. The payoff analysis we did earlier suggests that infrastructure, applications, and middleware will be transformed in different ways and exhibit different equilibrium mixes of open and closed source. We recall that it also suggested the prevalence of open source in a particular software area would be a function of whether substantial network effects operate there, what the costs of failure are, and to what extent the software is a business-critical capital good. We can venture some predictions if we apply these heuristics not to individual products but to entire segments of the software market.