I certainly agree with Mark that the availability of Open Source Software is tremendous — I believe this has been the case for a long time.

DiveIntoMark: “In the future, there will be so much open source software available, programmers will be judged by how much they know about it and how well they can glue it together to build solutions.”

IMHO, the difference is that now so much of the open source software is geared toward the average user and has become increasingly less technically intense to install and deploy.

However, the hard work is applying it to a specific workflow or task.

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