Among the most durable misapprehensions postponing the dawn of the Open-Source Age must be the notion that when software is free, it means that programmers will not be paid. In fact, they never did.
Most developers write software for use within their companies.
The software is never sold, and their salaries have nothing to do with the retail value of the applications they write. The software makes the device more valuable, but the developers' salaries are not calculated based on the retail value of the software. Consultants get paid when they deliver software, but they are really paid for solving their clients' problems. Even in companies that produce software for retail sale, most developer time is devoted to planning, bug-fixing, documentation and maintenance tasks, not the generation of salable code. Thus, the open-source revolution is no threat to developers' livelihoods.