I'm confused...aren't there quite a few counter examples to your claims? Things like Linux, Apache, MySQL, PostgreSQL, PHP, Python, Perl, Ruby, Firefox, etc, etc?
I'd feel better about your rant if you weren't a) biased against the idea and ethos of FOSS, and b) selling something.
Many of those projects were started by college students. Linux was a fork of another flavor of unix started by Linus Torvalds when he was a masters student. Apache started as a proof of concept during the early days of the internet and morphed into what it is. IIS is better. The only reason Apache has more installs than IIS is because Linux is free.
MySQL is not as good as either MS SQL Server or Oracle and you can pay for MySQL Support from the company that produces it. PostgreSQL was also started at a university by professors getting paid to eat and buy clothes.
PHP doesn't hold a Candle to either .NET or Java, which you should have listed if you wanted to really try to convince me I'm wrong. Java is pretty good, but is commercially funded and those programmers get to eat. There's a lot of fanboyism around PHP and I'm not one of those.
Perl is awesome. It was created by a programmer at a publicly funded organization - NASA. It should be open source and he also got to eat while writing it.
Ruby is a great language if you know how to "drop down into C."
Firefox is commercially supported by Google search results. They make millions of dollars a year and honestly, it should be way higher quality than it is considering the budget they have to work with. Opera kicks firefox's butt all over the place. Firefox is good, don't get me wrong, but it doesn't change my mind.
The examples you give are a tiny fraction of the open source environment and most of them do not contradict what I have said.
Here's a challenge for you. Get a fresh laptop running whatever operating system you want, then see how long it takes you to fix an open bug in at least 3 of those products you mention.
You sound pissed that these FOSS projects are kicking the ass of products that you consider to be superior.
The fact that many of these projects were started by college students, grew out of commercial enterprises, or have a business model that allows people to get paid for working on them doesn't validate your claim that open source devalues your work. If anything, the opposite is true.
Here's a challenge to you: install any of your closed-source proprietary products that you're in love with and see how long it takes you to fix an open bug in one of them.
It would be silly for me to be "pissed" about something that is not true.
You are missing the point. Programmers, we love what we do. I know that. I know it makes us happy to write good software and to tinker and experiment. I do it myself. I give away work all the time. I find bugs, I fix bugs, I give away code I've written in community forums and talk to people and help them find solutions to the problems they run into.
When a business person comes up to you and says, "Why should I pay you when I can get it for free?" That means your work has been devalued by a free version. The person writing that free version feels good because more users are on the system, but more users on the system does not pay the rent.
The current system of open source is flawed at its core. It means that people's skills are not sufficient to feed them.
Take the example of social networks and free websites. How many have gone bankrupt and had to lay off all their employees?
Imagine if actors in hollywood worked for free? Writers worked for free? Singers and directors and bar tenders worked for free? There'd be no movies or only the movies on Youtube that people put up there to see how many hits they get.
Can't you see that mathematically the equation doesn't balance?
Imagine if bankers on Wall Street worked for free.
Just because we love what we do doesn't mean it that work should be given away for free. Someone in another thread mentioned this very hacker news site is open source and yes I know that and I also know that pg has a bazillion dollars in the bank. Why isn't he paying someone to build it? Because he loves hacking, I know, but he is taking a job from someone. He's making the world a better place, yes, I do not discount that.
I do not discount that the world is a better place -- right now -- for many because of free software. I would say it is disporportionately better for the business commmunity that doesn't have to pay the billions of dollars their software is worth and worse for the programmers that are now being laid off in silicon valley because no one needs them to write software they can get for free.
It doesn't work.
Did you know Computer Science graduation rates are on a steady decline? Why? Because the jobs are too hard and they don't pay enough? Why? Because the products those college graduates would get paid doing don't exist because they products can't be sold for wages that can support them.
The very foundation of our society is in jeopardy because we are not paying for the work that is increasingly more relevant to its existence. Not only are college graduation rates in the computer sciences declining, but employers are complaining about the quality of programmers they are seeing coming out of colleges.
As long as we give away our labor for free, this trend will continue. There are good examples of successful quality products that have come out of the open source community and great things have been done with those products that improve many lives. I do not discount this.
What I am saying is that if this trend continues, salaries will continue to decline and those who could get paid decent salaries that could feed a family and allow them to concentrate on building the information infrastructure our world needs to continue learning, asking questions, sharing and gaining knowledge will stagnate because the individuals with the capacity to be creative in the industry will take higher paying jobs in other industries like banking and finance and look what high paying jobs in those industries gets the world.
You're not making any sense. Here are a couple of the logical holes in your argument:
1. Demand for programming is variable, not fixed. Our demand for great programmers is arguably much higher today than it would have been without OS, because so many companies only exist today because they could afford to launch using OS, not to mention all the hybrid business models that make money off of OS (Sun, MySQL, Mozilla, etc).
2. Technology makes some people redundant. That's the nature of progress, and every major technological shift is accompanied by hand-wringing over all the jobs that will be lost. But in the end, technological progress almost always results in net job gains, net productivity gains, net wage gains. Adapt.
I think your main problem is with free market economics, not open source software.
I'd feel better about your rant if you weren't a) biased against the idea and ethos of FOSS, and b) selling something.