As you said Bryan, some is still paying. If you need a project done, and you don't have the skills for it, you must pay someone else, or convince someone to give their time. In addition to that, there is open source software that pays.
Start up costs are also a lot lower. The only real cost is your time, there is no specialized equipment needed, that costs money. This is not the same for DiyBio, RepRap or other projects. It's more affordable to program in your spare time. As a child, programming was the only avenue that I had, because I had no money. I just had to go to the library, and read a book and type on a computer.
There still needs to be a flow of money with more physical projects. You need labor to build it, labor to maintain it, and constant material to feed it. A single open sourced machine will not "put maximum competition and minimum wages", because there are a billion different fields that will pick up the displaced labor.
Tim Butram
http://www.worldsproject.org
On Mon, Jul 18, 2011 at 8:43 PM, Bryan Bishop
<kanzure@gmail.com> wrote:
On Mon, Jul 18, 2011 at 7:37 PM, Patrick Anderson wrote:
> Do you agree this is already what we see in Free Software:
> that wages are approaching zero (much work done gratis)?
The wages aren't approaching zero; rather, programmers subsidize their
own time with their own money. Some is still paying.
- Bryan
http://heybryan.org/
1 512 203 0507