Just seems like such a waste and detriment to the software engineering profession
Imagine a world with no open source: no Linux, Apache, gcc, Perl, MySQL, Emacs, etc, etc. If you want a website, you have to pay through the nose for a commercial OS, web server, database, and compilers and scripting languages. Will the demand for software developers be higher or lower in that world compared to ours?
Through the nose? I deal primarily with MS software and I've never had to pay through the nose for OSes, internet servers, programming languages, SQL, or Visual Studio. I pay a crazily small amount compared to the sums I make off the vast amount of tools I use.
I'm just trying to put your post into another perspective. I can pay for the tools for a year with a days work. Seems a bargain to me. Perhaps OSS has driven that cost down, we can't a/b test worlds unfortunately.
While I do love using OSS, a lot of it is very user hostile compared to commercial software. Yes mysql, openoffice and gimp, I'm looking at you.
What about people who can't afford $600+ for software?
How would they learn?
Part of the reason I didn't start coding earlier in my life is (I started late high school) is because I didn't know about the free/ open source alternatives to the programs you had to pay for that were in all the books I had access to.
Imagine a world with no open source: no Linux, Apache, gcc, Perl, MySQL, Emacs, etc, etc. If you want a website, you have to pay through the nose for a commercial OS, web server, database, and compilers and scripting languages. Will the demand for software developers be higher or lower in that world compared to ours?