SOLVING PROBLEMS WITH SOFTWARE
Contributing to open-source projects is a great way for programmers to develop new skills, collaborate, and build reputations. Brett Howell, cofounder of BlockWave, gets this, but he has also spent much of his career traveling the world, and, from this perspective, he can’t help but see that the open-source movement tends to obscure the economic disparity that exists around the globe.
The freedom to contribute time is great, Howell says, for the “enabled, well-heeled middle class” for whom the value of time often becomes disconnected from the income we earn at the job we do. Not everyone, however, has this luxury. For so many in the world who must work in survival mode, it’s an impossible dream to write code in the hope that it will eventually get them noticed by enterprises and tech companies that look to open-source coders when hiring
Read more about it on IEEE Xplore Digital Library.
