FOSS Development As Economic Stimulus 365
heybus writes "Economist Dean Baker, best known for calling the housing bust and warning of the ensuing economic collapse, has just published his recommendations for how to allocate President-elect Obama's estimated $800 billion economic stimulus plan. Among other things, Baker calls for juicing the economy with $2 billion worth of government spending to support the development of free and open source software. Baker's idea is similar to the New Deal federal arts and writers' projects: the government would fund projects as long as they produce freely available code. In addition to employing programmers, 'the savings [to consumers] in the United States alone could easily exceed the cost of supporting software development.'"
This is a bad idea (Score:5, Funny)
FOSS software increases productivity. It reduces overhead and costs. The evolution of free software reduces the demand for programming and support labor in the long term.
This is not good for the economy. Our economy is hopelessly reliant on unskilled twits who can barely keep our infrastructure running; who spend many hours increasing the problem rather than diminishing it, and who get paid a good wage doing that so they can buy the latest Plasma TV and show off to their friends their XBox skillz in HiDef. If everybody converted to Linux and BSD in the server room, there's another quarter million MCSEs out of work. Imagine all the servers that won't need to be updated on Patch Tuesday and Surprise Thursday! It'll be utter anarchy! Some servers won't be rebooted for months.
This is bad... for Obama.
The only problems is (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Open Source (Score:0, Funny)
I'm a level 80 Whorelock thank you very much... and the other nerd who release Wowbuntu with me lives in his own basement! So ha! ha! In your fase!!1
Re:"Called the housing bust" (Score:3, Funny)
"I still do not fully understand why it happened." Alan Greenspan, October 2008.
I want to be irrationally exuberant again.