Does Open Source Software Cost Jobs? 530
jfruhlinger writes "John Spencer, a British blogger and tech educator, is convinced that free and open source software, which he's promoted for years, is costing IT jobs, as UK schools cut support staff no longer needed. But does the argument really hold up? It turns out that the services he's focused on are actually cloud services that are reducing the need for schools to provide their own tech infrastructure. Of couse, it's also true that many of those cloud services are themselves based on open source tech."
Quote Investigator to the rescue! (Score:5, Informative)
http://quoteinvestigator.com/2011/10/10/spoons-shovels/ [quoteinvestigator.com]
At one of our dinners, Milton recalled traveling to an Asian country in the 1960s and visiting a worksite where a new canal was being built. He was shocked to see that, instead of modern tractors and earth movers, the workers had shovels. He asked why there were so few machines. The government bureaucrat explained: "You don’t understand. This is a jobs program." To which Milton replied: "Oh, I thought you were trying to build a canal. If it’s jobs you want, then you should give these workers spoons, not shovels."
Re:Clouds don't fly by themselves... (Score:5, Informative)
You still need somebody to deal with physical architecture, routers, and the like. The cloud takes at least some high-level services off your hands, but it sure doesn't do you much good when your router decides today is the day it's going to die.
As to open source costing jobs, it's a strange claim, as I get paid the same whether I install MS-Office or LibreOffice, or whether I'm using a Samba server or a Windows server for file sharing.
At the end of the day, while I'm ambivalent with this 21st century version of a client-server model (after all, that's all the "cloud" really is), I can see situations, particularly with schools, where administrators may not want large parts of their budgets going to server maintenance, licensing costs and the like looking to online solutions.
Re:Um, wrong cause for the effect. (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Quote Investigator to the rescue! (Score:4, Informative)
Stimulas Spending [xkcd.com]
As you can see, only 3% of the stimulus spending seems to have gone into our infrastructure. Most of it went into tax breaks and "other spending". It would be interesting to see what is in that "other spending", but would it be too much to assume that it is likely congressional pet projects?
Personally, I would have given up my tax breaks if we could shove the money into infrastructure instead. It would be nice to not have to duct tape everything together.
I actually GOT jobs thanks to Open Source (Score:5, Informative)
If it wasn't for Open Source, I'd be bust by now. I'm a graphics artist, and thanks to Open Source I managed to work my way up from poverty to success.
I could offer cheaper labor and in-house services to small rising companies that needed ad-work due to lower software costs, and that made me very popular. As well as getting much faster help from idealistic programmers that took pride in correcting bugs rather than trying to protect a corporate image (and thus deny every bug report ever given to them).
3 times HURRAH for Open Source! It's the new way of life.
Re:Quote Investigator to the rescue! (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Duh (Score:5, Informative)
Professional == You are paid what you do
Amateur == You are not paid what you do
Skilled == You have learn to do well what you do
Talented == You are fast learner or adapt quickly what you do
Someone can be a amateur, but still skilled programmer.
Someone else can be professional but still bad programmer.
And on what point did we really turn out that ranking of people is based their wealth and not to what they do?
I rank a school teacher higer than a CEO of big company.
I rank a worker higher than a CEO of that company where that worker works.
After all, technology should help people, allow people to enjoy the life. Not work harder or longer. People should have less working time, more free time and we should have already taken care of poor and other people who can not get their life working so they do get their life working. We have technology, we have way to do so. But we do not do so if CEO do not profit from it so much that you can buy a few airplanes and fifth house. And we rank those people so high that people coming after them, are ready to do anything to get their positions before them.
Competition does not help anyone, alternativies does.
Competition != Alternativies
Alternativies != Competition
We can have alternativies without competition.
Prise the alternativies and freedom, not competition and suffering.
Re:Quote Investigator to the rescue! (Score:5, Informative)
These days, it's basically a bare-minimum subsidy for the trucking industry, which has caused our national railway infrastructure to decay in ways that are completely unreasonable and results in far more smog output than there otherwise would be from cross-country freight.
It's worth pointing out that, although you were trying to show how public infrastructure has crumbled, freight trains are run by private companies that largely own the track they use. In fact, Amtrak runs on privately owned tracks, for the most part: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amtrak [wikipedia.org] (third paragraph).