Meaningful vs. meaningless support from businesses

> I presume many people here program for a living and want to be sure that there's a lot of demand on the job market for software developers. I'd like to know your theory for how the realization of Red Hat's vision (them making $5B in exchange for destroying $50B others make) would be good for programmers seeking (or seeking to retain) a job. Should tens of thousands of developers currently developing proprietary software be laid off and enter the job market? If not, what's your theory for how they will all be better off if Red Hat does what its CEO says?

Look who's whining about job losses now. It's always the same thing - we can't change the economy because people will lose jobs - an argument used by monopolies worldwide. Well, yeah, that's how transformation generally works. A less efficient model is replaced by a more efficient one.

It is not about who's going to keep their jobs. It is about how much money the general public need to spend on a particular type of good.

So, the theory has nothing to do with programmers being better off. It has everything to do with general public being better off.

BTW, if Red Hat need to grow ten times (example) to get to $5B, that means that 10 times more _open_ _source_ programmers will get a job there. In terms of others, like myself, who get paid by _other_ companies (not strictly in the business of open source) to use and maintain this software, we'll continue being paid just fine. And we'll contribute back just fine (in my case, admittedly, not as much as I would like to, but somewhat). And you may also find that should more proprietary software be displaced by open source, more folks like myself will be around in these "other" companies, creating an even more powerful community. You are ignoring this effect entirely.

Your world view involves replacing one thing with another, without any change whatsoever occurring anywhere. This is not the nature of progress. Disruptive changes, like this one, change many different aspects of society and new equilibrium is then established. This is then shattered by a different model, when the weight of the next big change is sufficient to collapse the new, now old model. At which point, more whining will be heard about job losses and the like.