Where are the open source jobs?

Very common questions when I speak at events or talk to my students is "What language should I learn?" or "Should I learn X?" or "My cousin Ralph said that there's no money in Y, is he right?"

In the spirit of providing more interesting trend data, I decided to take a look at what I could find in the job market to identify trends and especially to see how open source fares against closed source in a down economy. I hope this is helpful to you. I welcome your feedback and suggestions as always. Keep reading to view the results.

For this study, I chose a few sites that provide data. I'll blog about others. For this post I'll use the pretty charts and graphs from http://indeed.com. Thank you! I do not pretend the data can hold up to peer reviewed academic journal review. However, the data is decent and can show trends over time. For the sake of this study, I chose New York City as the location as I believed the ratio of open to closed source salaries and jobs should be consistent in a huge city.

I'm sure the closed source company marketing departments would like you to believe there's no future in open source - sorry to disappoint.

Starting off with operating systems, you can clearly see that there is demand for Linux and the pay for Linux jobs is decent.

(I must say, I'm not sure what is happening with the MacOS salaries!)

In the database market, Oracle may run away with the market share thus lead you to expect they'd run away with the jobs. This isn't so - the open source DBMSs hold their own. PostgreSQL is a fine DBMS so I'm not sure why the salaries would be so out of line from the others.

In terms of programming languages, the closed source competition has no hold over the open source implementations:

(In my opinion, it is thus better to learn an open source implementation than a closed source language that locks you into a specific platform like VB.NET or C# without Mono)

The open source appservers do just fine:

In the Business applications area, there clearly is room for growth of open source business applications:

(It does look like SugarCRM has arrived!)

For content management systems, there are multiple fine open source choices and this is reflected in the postings & salaries: