Open Source professionals higher skills, higher paid: survey

By Stan Beer
Monday, 10 March 2008 17:12

Open Source

A new survey of companies and individuals supplying Open Source solutions and services claims to show that Open Source IT professionals make more money than their proprietary IT counterparts because they're more highly skilled.

The Australian survey, Open Source census 2007, funded by IBM and Fujitsu, was conducted by Open Source strategic consulting firm Waugh Partners under the guidance of NICTA (National ICT Australia). The survey sample included 327 individuals working on Australian Open Source projects in Australia and abroad, as well as 129 companies providing Open Source services. The Open Source census 2007 is claimed to be the first national research project to study companies and contributors involved in the Australian Open Source industry.

According to Waugh Partners co-proprietor Jeff Waugh, individuals who are doing Open Source work on their own time or who are getting paid for it - tend to earn more than others in the IT industry.

"The median wage for Open Source workers is greater," says Waugh. "Those who are working full time on Open Source tend to earn quite a bit more indeed."

So why are Open Source workers getting paid more?

"Generally, they are more skilled and they are doing things that more deeply technical," says Waugh. "Their experience of the Open Source community provides them with a much deeper, more practical education than others might get.

"In the average computing science degree, you generally learn about writing software but you very rarely learn about reading source code. This has been a problem for a long time now, The industry really wants people who can do the most important part of practical software development which is reading other people's source code and modifying it rather than writing it from scratch.

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