Small-time developer in a big pond

In response to the Feb. 8 column by Charles Cooper, "Developers feel the squeeze":

I am one of those "small" developers in the big pond and I find it extremely difficult to get along in the tech world for many reasons, some of which Cooper touched upon.

I'm more of an "open-source" software believer and use things like MySQL, Java, Linux and so on. But now things are getting extremely tough. A chat-bot application I work on is going nowhere, and I find myself having to go back to the pool. It's ridiculous, because now I have to "educate" myself again to use Oracle and Microsoft tools.

What makes things even worse is that even as a small-time developer, I can't go to a conference without asking an exhibitor a simple question and having them say, "We work with Oracle, so if you have Oracle, you could do A, B and C."

What kind of small-time developer has $20,000 to blow on Oracle? What's even more two-sided about it is that the public is brainwashed by these companies, so even if you do come out with a cool app, the first thing they ask is if it will work with Oracle or Microsoft.

In the end, the big companies win. Some of the dot-coms built cool freebie software, but now that they're gone, we have to go back to the Oracles and Microsofts of the world. Like Cooper said: If 10 years from now we still have to hit Ctrl-Alt-Delete, some of us will be sitting back and wondering whether that small little idea we had to give up on could have changed the world.

Jon Baer
Brooklyn, N.Y.