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."
Translation: (Score:5, Insightful)
Cotton Spinners (Score:5, Insightful)
There isn't much need for cotton spinners or candlemakers any more either. Are we to mourn those jobs as well?
Clouds don't fly by themselves... (Score:5, Insightful)
Um, wrong cause for the effect. (Score:5, Insightful)
Software that isn't designed to require constant hands-on maintenance costs jobs.
OSS is not always in that category, sadly.
Re:Translation: (Score:5, Insightful)
I can't remember the exact source (and because I'm really a secret Luddite I won't search for it) but this reminds me of the saying about the public works project where one overseer says that in order to increase employment they should take away the workers' shovels and give them spoons, and the other one says "why give them spoons?"
You know what costs jobs? (Score:5, Insightful)
You know what costs jobs? Efficiency. Economic efficiency always costs jobs. Often, it's creating other jobs elsewhere, but maybe not. Maybe it just means that job doesn't need to be done anymore.
You can create jobs by paying people to dig ditches and then fill them back in. Or you can create jobs by hiring support people you don't need, building infrastructure that can be handled more efficiently elsewhere, or paying people to write software that you don't need because an open source alternative is already available. It's the same as digging useless ditches.
Do you really want to create jobs? Great. Hire people to do something useful that can't be handled more efficiently by open source software. Or hire them to improve open source software-- god knows there's work to be done.
Re:Um, wrong cause for the effect. (Score:5, Insightful)
Neither is the most expensive payware stuff.
At least with the Libre stuff, I don't have to needlessly waste money and I can be as much in control of things as I want to be.
School +Teachers -IT staff (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Clouds don't fly by themselves... (Score:5, Insightful)
Once the clouds burst, there will be even more jobs than before. Looping is endemic in this industry.
A classic parable (Score:2, Insightful)
There was an American who was given a tour of a Chinese government work project. The project consisted of the construction of several dams, canals and a series of highways that were to join various isolated portions of the vast country together. The American observer, upon seeing the vast army of workers, asked the Chinese officials why there were so many shovels and no tractors. The official responded to this question by explaining that they were not building a dam but instead were creating jobs. The American, seeing the government officials great pride at just how many jobs they were creating, asked the obvious question; âoeWhy donâ(TM)t you give them spoons?â
Copied from http://andrewkboyle.com/2011/06/21/digging-with-spoons/ [andrewkboyle.com], but he probably copied it from somewhere else.
Re:You know what costs jobs? (Score:5, Insightful)
Indeed. TFA is just a thinly veiled broken window fallacy.
Re:The way I see it (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:You know what costs jobs? (Score:5, Insightful)
And yet, we don't have an 85% unemployment rate. The efficiency didn't reduce jobs, it created jobs. It freed people up to work on other things. Better software tech will do the same thing. The worst effect is a temporary period of unrest while employees adapt to new circumstances.
Re:Rocket Science? (Score:4, Insightful)
Once you've basically turned the computers into dumb terminals managed remotely and the only thing required is a connection to the net, you no longer need a network administrator.
... until one (or more) of those dumb terminals is unable to connect to its remote services. Then you'll be right back where you started, except now you have to pay that same netadmin outrageous consulting wages 'cuz he's not on the payroll.
Hindsight is always 20/20.
Re:You know what costs jobs? (Score:4, Insightful)
An interesting piece of this story: If it's allowing companies or governments to lay people off, how can OSS have a higher cost of ownership due to labor costs, as Microsoft has been claiming for much of the last decade?
Re:Um, wrong cause for the effect. (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, no, the expensive payware stuff is often expressly designed to employ consultants from the company that designed it.
But what I've noticed is that Linux itself is a much bigger management hassle than Windows is. Untrained people manage their own Windows installations fairly easily (i.e., it runs with less intervention, and can update 99% of its installed software without any intervention). Even trained people (even I) have trouble just getting the average Linux distro to a basic, usable state, then updating it with typical software on occasion.
Even the distros that are specifically designed for minimal h4xx0r talent are only truly canned for a small subset of hardware configurations.
The ultimate answer here is that anyone who does a trade study on which software to use and doesn't make a realistic assessment of the total-cost-to-own has failed to do a trade study properly. Just saying "is it open source?" is a guarantee of random results.
Re:Of course it does. (Score:2, Insightful)
Look at all the fletchers that had to find new lines of work when the cannon and flintlock were introduced. When cavalry abandoned horses and went to tanks and armored vehicles, I'm sure more than a few blacksmiths who had had a pretty fine job found themselves out on their asses.
Technology frequently reduces labor requirements. Civilization itself is built on that fact. The invention of agriculture allowed a certain percentage of the population the rather new and unique notion of "spare time", thus giving us writing, advanced mathematics, government and all the other trappings.
Re:Of course it does. (Score:2, Insightful)
The past is not the future.
The auto industry killed older jobs, but actually created more jobs than it killed, because it was, as yet, manual work to forge and assemble the many parts of an automobile.
But when the auto industry subsequently turned to the task of replacing its expensive manual laborers with relatively cheaper robotic workers, the auto industry killed its own jobs.
New industries have combined the two changes. They aren't merely replacing old jobs, they're replacing them with much more efficient new jobs, reducing the total workforce.
And then there's the irony of outsourcing, in which one local job is replaced by 2 or 3 or 5 ultra-cheap foreign jobs. But the people who are managing those jobs are realizing they can still replace their expensive workers with relatively cheaper robots.
The future isn't one of the fallacy of lamenting the buggy-whip. It's real mass unemployment, and the concentration of income and wealth in the hands of people who never actually used their hands to make a living in the first place.
Re:WTF (Score:3, Insightful)
Since when have jobs become the be-all and end-all of everything?
Since capitalism became the be-all and end-all of everything.
Re:Quote Investigator to the rescue! (Score:2, Insightful)
Did you do any of that? I bet you did less to access your conclusions that Milton did!
Re:Quote Investigator to the rescue! (Score:5, Insightful)
1) The WPA prolonged the Great Depression by about 7 extra years.
Show me one respected source saying so. And no, Gingrich and Palin's books don't count.
2) It wasn't something that really was within the mandate allowed by the Constitution.
Really? National, cross-state-border infrastructure would seem to be firmly in line with Section 8 of the US constitution.
3) At least for the debt, pain, etc. we GOT that standing infrastructure. The same can't be said for Obama's Stimulus, which seems to have produced LITTLE.
"Obama's Stimulus"... you mean the Bush Stimulus? Are you referring to the ERA of 2008, or the ARRA of 2009? If it's the latter, Obama signed it less than a month entering office. All the work on it was done months before by Congress, under the BUSH regime.
And in any event, the criticism of more than 90% of economists (read: any real economist that isn't a CATO Kochsucker) isn't that the ARRA was too large, but that it was too SMALL to have the desired effect and included too many bad tax breaks trying to get Republicans to sign on to the deal.
Re:Translation: (Score:5, Insightful)
With apologies to Star Trek:
Four-hundred years ago, on the planet Earth, workers who felt their livelihood threatened by automation, flung their wooden shoes, called sabo, into the machines to stop them . . . hence the word: sabotage.
It is funny how pretty much your EXACT argument was made some 100+ years ago. Today, in the industrialized world, we have a higher standard of living, on average, than the richest kings did 500, or even 200, years ago.
I'm not saying your points are an exact correlation to the late 19th century complaints, but you really should keep it in mind. And people have already tried to change the economic systems to account for industrialization and automation. Communism was precisely such an attempt (indeed, you language sounds extremely like Marx, especially your closing comment. I'm not criticizing: just commenting. Wrong as he may have been, Marx did have a few valid points.) I'm not saying we won't need to change: that is practically inevitable at some point. What I am saying is we should be very, very careful about how and when we do it.
Re:Quote Investigator to the rescue! (Score:5, Insightful)
Indeed. Where I live, there's a ton of crumbling infrastructure. A good portion of it is roads that are 50+ years old. I've driven on WPA-produced roads through a neighboring state where the road - poured concrete - has literally turned itself to gravel over the years through neglect. Republican leaders of the state don't spend anything on maintenance, and their "solution" to the road becoming unsafe is - I'm not kidding - to just keep reducing the posted speed limit to something that's "safe for conditions" on an unmaintained road.
A frightening concept, given that the US interestate system (formally, the Dwight D. Eisenhower National System of Interstate and Defense Highways) was originally pitched to Congress under the military provisions of Section 8 of the Constitution, to provide for a network of roadways capable of moving military equipment from base to base. 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.
Re:Um, wrong cause for the effect. (Score:5, Insightful)
" If your software requires a ton of hands on support, you might as well charge for the hands-on support"
That's called a support contract, and a LOT of crapware vertical market companies do that.
$13,500 for that billing system and another $10,000 a year for "updates" and "support"
without the support contract the system is a useless turd that breaks within weeks as you discover old bugs in their crappy VB6 code.
Re:Quote Investigator to the rescue! (Score:4, Insightful)
Possibly, but just because some infrastructure spending by the government is good doesn't mean all of it is. In fact, only a tiny fraction of the Federal budget these days goes to those kinds of projects. Most of it goes to entitlements and the military, neither of which contributes to our economy (and the military is mostly doing things for our so-called "friends and allies"). And may I also point out that the kinds of infrastructure projects the WPA undertook wouldn't be possible today because of environmental concerns and extensive lawsuits? So, the "socialistic-communistic-pinko-liberal" politics with creating this infrastructure back then is the very same kind of "socialistic-communistic-pinko-liberal" politics that is preventing it today.
So, let's slash military and entitlement spending and focus on infrastructure again. Of course, that proposal attacks both parties' holy cows.
Re:Translation: (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Duh (Score:5, Insightful)
Paid for = jobs
free = no jobs
not really a hard concept
Actually, it is kinda hard. HTML and Apache are free and open, and yet they provided an explosion of jobs and practical use for businesses, mostly _because_ they're open.
Re:Quote Investigator to the rescue! (Score:2, Insightful)
that won't be true for long, catastrophically low infrastructure spending is allowing all of that WPA era infrastructure to crumble to dust
All of the WPA infrastructure is obsolete, and was actually obsolete before it was finished. Other than hiking trails thru the woods and stone guard rails in national parks, there is very little of our infrastructure need that is met by WPA projects. One does not build a four lane bridge over the Mississippi with "one man rocks".
Repairing even the wilderness trails is too expensive in a society that prefers to pay the skill-less to sit idle and collect the dole rather than actually lift a finger, let a lone a bag of cement.
The idea that you can put people to work in exchange for basic wages has been totally denigrated by the liberal entitlement mind set.
Re:Duh (Score:5, Insightful)
A common misconception related to piracy, foss, etc (anything where you are not paying) is that not paying = reducing the number of jobs. In reality, money doesn't just disappear, but rather it is spent elsewhere. Pirating software or using FOSS instead might cut some jobs in the software industry, but, for example, I might spend the money on more/better food, thus creating jobs in the food industry. Of course, the effect is largest with businesses which will almost always choose to spend money rather than save it.
Saying that FOSS or piracy or whatever is killing some industry or costing that industry jobs isn't necessarily false, but it doesn't hurt the economy. It's like when cars became popular. Sure, the horse-drawn carriage industry suffered, but the jobs and economy lost were made up for by the auto industry.
Re:Quote Investigator to the rescue! (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Quote Investigator to the rescue! (Score:5, Insightful)
Do the math. That's wrong by a tremendous degree. You can download the data directly from the IRS. Go ahead.
Re:You know what costs jobs? (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, but what you need to realize, is that's 85% of people working on NONESSENTIAL things. If people stop having the means or will to buy NONESSENTIAL things (read, the middle class is eliminated by eliminatng their jobs, so they can't afford gadgets or entertainment or health care), then 85% of people will be out of work and will starve or revert to subsistence farming (if they can get land!), because while there's food for everyone, well, we can't force that productive 5% to feed everyone who has no means to pay them, now can we?
People don't seem to realize how dangerous this cycle of concentrating more and more wealth in the hands of the rich is. The rich don't generate enough demand to drive an economy. Why should a rich guy, whose factory is at 75% capacity, invest in more factory capacity? THIS is the current situation--too much wealth with the rich, not enough with the poor and middle class, who generate demand. And this is the fallacy of "supply side" economics right now. We have capital, there's just no reason to invest the capital in increased capacity because there's no demand. Tax cuts for the rich are horribly misguided right now. If we had factories at 95% capacity or more and no capital to invest, then yes, tax cuts for the rich so they can invest in capacity.
--PM
Re:Duh (Score:5, Insightful)
Just think about all the people that could be employed making bottled breathable air, if people weren't allowed to just breathe naturally-occurring air.
This all goes back to the Broken Window Fallacy.
"Bunch of Commies" (Score:5, Insightful)
You saved money. How is that "trouble?" If you were "creating jobs" and all else were equal, that would have wasted money.
Whoever said that didn't understand anything about economics.
Free Markets vs Central Planning: Free Software is about extremified free markets. You hire anyone you want to get your maintenance, instead of a single source. This is basically opposition to commie ideals, IMHO (though I realize there are other ways to look at Communism; they just happen to be ways that I disagree with). On the commie centralization scale of color, GPLed software is blue as the zenith sky, proprietary is crimson as blood, and stuff like BSD is an intense purple blur as it bounces between the two on a case-by-case basis like a Republican talking about federal spending.
Control of the Means of Production: Free Software is about code reuse and code reuse is neutral toward this, but in a way that subverts the whole question with its explosive torrent of wealth. It's like millions of factories falling out of the sky, right during an argument between a Communist and Capitalist about who should own the previously-limited number of factories. Without the need for expensive capital, nobody cares who controls it. Both the management and workers look on helplessly, as whoever used to buy the old factories' output says they don't need either one of 'em anymore.
If paychecks for programming are your main source of income, then code reuse may be a Capitalist Running Dog Murder of Brotherhood. If software company dividends (as opposed to consulting fees) are your main source of income, then code reuse may be a Ruthless Communist Plot to Impurify your Precious Bodily Fluids. If you do something else but use software, then you're shrugging and saying "whatever" to those so last-century luddites.
Re:Um, wrong cause for the effect. (Score:3, Insightful)
Picture a desert island with two people. At first they both work all day long to survive. Later, they improve their lot, to where they each only have to work half the time to survive. The other half can be spent loafing, or working to get more comfortable. Is one of them entitled to relax and do nothing while the other needs to work all day long to support them? Of course not. Each person has the option of working full time to improve their position, part time to simply survive, or they may die. They aren't owed anything.
Your analogy is missing a third party: the absentee owner of the island. A more accurate analogy would be that, having developed a more efficient means of harvesting coconuts, one of the two island inhabitants receives a slightly larger number of coconuts than before, while the second fellow's previous coconut wages were instead diverted to the island owner's offshore pina colada factory, leaving the second fellow to eke out a decidedly calorie-free lifestyle.
This is, in the island owner's view, the proper order of things: he paid the fellow to develop a more efficient coconut harvesting strategy, and thus is entitled to a nice drink at the end of the day.
This is, in the first fellow's view, also the proper order of things: he developed the improved technique, and thus is entitled to a few extra coconuts.
In the second fellow's view, any discussion about the abstract problems of coconut division in an isolated island economy is pointless academic frippery because he is, at this point, starving to death on a fucking desert island.
Sooner or later, productivity gains will land us in a scenario where there isn't enough work to go around, and the jobs that do remain will require so much technical expertise as to render them unattainable for most people. For the remaining majority, the question is: what the fuck are we going to do in order to earn our daily coconuts?
Re:Translation: (Score:4, Insightful)
And aren't we? I don't do the dishes (my dishwasher does), I don't do the laundry (my washing machine does and my dryer too), my stove turns on at the flip of a button unless I use the microwave and I live in a 500 square feet apartment all by myself. Take a reality check on what kind of housing people lived in during the 1950s, how many they shared it with and how much of their income went to just put food on the table. Try asking your parents or grandparents how often they took vacation, how long and what exotic destinations they went to. And whether they'd get equally expensive toys like game consoles or such, inflation adjusted of course. Ask them how often they'd go to a cafe or restaurant, how many pair of shoes your average teenage girl had then compared to now and so on.
Unless they were of the very privileged sort, I bet they'd tell you it was lots and lots of work and chores with much less leisure time and luxuries than today. Oh, I'm so sorry some college schmuck has to work his way through college and don't feel he got enough time to party and chase college tail. My dad started working full time at 15 and went to evening school just to get an education, before that he was used to being an errand boy and farm hand besides school. Handed down clothes was common and any presents he got was either home made or practical in nature, I recall him talking about being very happy to get a pair of new shoes, his old were falling apart. Most of the people I see claiming they're poor still lead lives that are much, much better than the 1950s. Of course it sucks to not afford what "normal" people do, but if you make any kind of absolute standard of living I think you'd find that yes, they can afford everything a 1950s family could afford and then some.
Re:Quote Investigator to the rescue! (Score:5, Insightful)
"Repairing even the wilderness trails is too expensive in a society that prefers to pay the skill-less to sit idle and collect the dole rather than actually lift a finger, let a lone a bag of cement."
What a bunch of garbage. The vast majority of people have to work for a living and there are plenty of people without jobs who've been looking for ages. The whole IDEA that it's just 'lazyness' is simple minded bullshit.