Open source and free software was the largest transfer of wealth in the form of techne freely from the craftspeople to the business people.
Knowing how to write a database could make one fabulously rich. Now the person who knows how to make and promote a simple crud app backed my MySql becomes the rich one, while the db people beg for donations.
Linux killed Sun/Solaris and SGI Irix
Developers have voluntarily moved further down in the chain of value - now just describing themselves as primarily a business liaison who can translate to code. All the computer whispering necessary to do all this is freely available and digestible for free.
Well said. This also aptly describes the emergence of “script kiddies“ in the early 2000’s (now comically referred to as “engineers“). Promotion of simply combining libraries that are not understood by amateurish developers into mostly poorly implemented solutions thrust upon the end users. Corporations loved the lower salaries of web developers and the efficiency of utilizing open source libraries, thereby devaluing the skilled developers whose original intent was to share their knowledge via these oss libraries. Web development was the most affected by this trend initially, and as we see now is mostly impacted by the emergence of LLM‘s.
Knowing how to write a database could make one fabulously rich. Now the person who knows how to make and promote a simple crud app backed my MySql becomes the rich one, while the db people beg for donations.
Linux killed Sun/Solaris and SGI Irix
Developers have voluntarily moved further down in the chain of value - now just describing themselves as primarily a business liaison who can translate to code. All the computer whispering necessary to do all this is freely available and digestible for free.
LLMs are just the expected endpoint of this.