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)
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?"
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:Quote Investigator to the rescue! (Score:5, Interesting)
Considering this ideological simplified nonsense is fashionable on /., it is worth pointing out that a socialistic-communistic-pinko-liberal jobs program, the WPA, is responsible for most of the standing infrastructure that the US, the world's biggest economy relies upon every day.
Re:Quote Investigator to the rescue! (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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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).
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.
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Re:Quote Investigator to the rescue! (Score:4, Interesting)
You obviously don't understand how taxes work. If you have $100, when you spend it the government takes (e.g.) $25. They can (in theory; they never actually do) put that against the debt. Then the person you paid the $75 has $75 and the person the government paid $25 has $25, a total of $100. When they spend the $100, the government gets another $25. Repeat until debt is paid.
Of course, governments never really repay their debts. When a bond is due, they issue a new bond to pay for it. The interest on government debt is almost by definition below the rate of inflation, so when governments want to "reduce" their debt they just stop increasing it and wait until inflation has devalued it sufficiently.
Re:Quote Investigator to the rescue! (Score:5, Interesting)
Oh shit. *BOTH* of their plans will eliminate capital gains taxes (i.e. taxes on money you earn in the stock market). Wait, don't the rich hold the vast majority of stocks? This means billionaires will see dramatically lower taxes. Warren Buffet, who was complaining that he was paying only 17% of his income in taxes (lower than everyone else he works with) will see his taxes drop to the low single-digits. GO REPUBLICANS!
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.
Re:Quote Investigator to the rescue! (Score:5, Interesting)
There are two San Francisco bridges - among the most used and photographed in the world - built within 6 years, during the 1930's.
The Golden Gate was a WPA project - approved and built in 4 years. The Bay Bridge, not formally WPA, benefited immensely from the large-scale mobilization of labour and planning that WPA enabled.
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.
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It's not that public jobs programs are bad, but they should aim to be efficient and to produce things that are needed. To my mind, the anecdote above is an example of waste, not because there was a jobs program, but because they made the jobs program inefficient. If they could have made the canal with half the men by using better machinery, they should have done that. If they wanted to employ the other half of the men, then they should have devised another useful project to employ them too.
There's alway
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You just totally misunderstood what you read. You should read the quotation again and ponder it.
That is not at all relevant to the point from the parent's quotation.
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:Quote Investigator to the rescue! (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.
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I too have seen long-neglected roads and Freeways repaved here in Los Angeles -- two lanes of Beverly Blvd from Hollywood to Silverlake were undriveable for years. If this costs me a few bucks in taxes, that's fine because I don't have to worry about the wheels coming off my car now.
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I fear the issue is more that the USA was top dog for so long, and by such a huge margin, that the populace has become complacent. Americans see success, prosperity, and a dominant position in the world as something they are entitled to, rather than as something they need to earn. The US, along with, to a lesser extent, the Soviet Union and the UK (not to undersell the achievements of the USSR, but they
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Not Milton Originally (Score:3)
Did you do any of that? I bet you did less to access your conclusions that Milton did!
Well, unless he copied his conclusions he probably did more since it looks as if Milton just copied the story from somewhere else. If you look at the Quote Investigator link you'll note that an incredibly similar story originated in Alberta in 1935. The Milton version is certainly far better put but it is not the original source.
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Agreed, if TCO is lower, then jobs are cost, end of story.
Maybe we can flip around the next MS based TCO study and be all, MS hates jobs.
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Re:Translation: (Score:4, Funny)
> Fuck you, what is TCO?
Fuck you, TCO is total cost of ownership.
Re:Translation: (Score:5, Interesting)
It's only a good thing if the standard of living is improving. Back decades ago it was commonly believed that by the 21st century people would be working only a few hours a day to provide for themselves and having a large amount of time off.
That didn't happen primarily because they underestimated the willingness of a willfully ignorant subset of the population to vote for class warfare against the lower and middle classes and for the wealth to accumulate at the top even at those at the bottom suffer.
Re:Translation: (Score:5, Interesting)
Efficiency is evil.
It's more insidious than that. If you do a job that can be automated, you are already redundant. Automation will only increase. On the flip side we have ever cheaper labour due to globalisation. The idea of earning your living doing an honest day's work is coming under severe pressure. Artificially retricting the automation is a band aid at best. Imagine what would happen if we were to suddenly have robots with human like abilities but not wants and desires - if that sci fi dream is ever realised the idea of having a job is going to become rather antiquated.
So if we don't destroy ourselves we will eventually need a change to our economic systems and our ideas on earning - that will be a huge and devasting change to make - unlike any other in history. Earning a living is an idea deeply ingrained into most societies. Our entire economy will need to be reworked if the vast majority are not to starve. What's more it must be done sustainably with the finite resources we have. The change isn't going to be pretty..
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.
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Standard of living != wealth. Especially not to relative wealth at the time. The average person now has better health-care, better food, better sanitation, almost always access to a car or public transportation, refrigeration, luxuries (coffee, chocolate, fresh fruit and vegetables, Internet access). Note that this is not true for the entire world, just the majority of the industrialized part.
But not the wealth, although that is far more distributed too. The average person today is also richer than average
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For example, you talk about cars and better food, but those ideas don't apply well to kings in the past. What's the point of a car today? They're necessary to drive to the supermarket, the school, to work, etc. But a king never did h
Re:Translation: (Score:5, Insightful)
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We ALL benefit from increased productivity, even those that don't have the latest greatest gadgets. How many have Microwaves and Refrigerators? How many have cars that can travel thousands of miles without breaking down once?
The problem with your hypothesis is that increased productivity hasn't helped everyone, when clearly it has. Your problem is that that it hasn't helped everyone "equally". Your view of fairness has simply ignored the facts.
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.
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?
Re:Cotton Spinners (Score:5, Funny)
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Even the spork predates the spoon.
Clouds don't fly by themselves... (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.
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.
That's the problem with TFA. (Score:5, Interesting)
He's blaming Open Source for automation.
But it doesn't matter if the "cloud" vendor is running Apache or IIS or whatever. Services will be consolidated and automated. It's about the economies of scale.
He talks about being "an Open Source apologist". Fuck that. That's all you need to read to know that that article is going to be worthless.
He's confusing:
#1. Open Source (Free) Software.
#2. Consolidation / Automation.
#3. The recession / depression / economic restructuring / whatever.
#4. Hardware / software / services (his example of Apple).
And then he complains about the loss of "fat profits". But he doesn't understand that someone has to PAY those "fat profits".
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I'm not sure 'smarter' is the right word. Right now a lot of servers are run by the least incompetent tech person in the office. It doesn't really matter if they're actually trained or really paid to do that job, but those young people know a lot about computers.
Putting services into the 'cloud' puts it into the hands of specialists in IT, and leaves non IT people for non IT jobs, which is what they should be doing anyway.
Also, any 'open source' project that runs anything worth real money is going to be b
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: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.
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.
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Nope. You're probably thinking of Oracle or something like that. You make better margins on software that requires minimal hands-on support. If your software requires a ton of hands on support, you might as well charge for the hands-on support, but your margins on that are never as good as your margins on straight software sales, because the marginal cost of each copy of software i
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.
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You're mistaking margin for profit.
Why sell one unit of something for $100,000 that costs me $1.50 to make a copy of, and then walk away, when I can then send out a body that I can charge $190K/year for who cost me $20k to train and who I pay $93k/year, and they'll stay there for 3 years until the next upgrade?
In your scenario, I make $33k/year over the 3-year upgrade cycle. In mine, I make $33k + $90K = $123k/year.
And then because the user has acquired no personal skill with the tool, I can sell the upgra
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99% -- maybe by file or component count, but importance? Every non-Microsoft package has its own auto-updater, some require manual intervention. I'm looking at you: Java. What program has had a stream of vulnerabilities? Java.
I have said it before and I will say it again: the Windows ecosystem would be far more secure if Microsoft provided a means for 3rd party software companies to utilize the Windo
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> Untrained people manage their own Windows installations fairly easily
That's really funny.
In reality, untrained people can't fend for themselves a all. This is despite of all of the propaganda about Windows being "easy" or "manageable". Meanwhile, they get their machines infected and are generally burdensome for those of us that have to play the roll of unpaid tech support.
Re:Um, wrong cause for the effect. (Score:5, Informative)
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Ubuntu "just worked" and was able to fully exploit all of the hardware on the first laptop I ever installed it on. It was a random bit of hardware that just happened to be available. I did not choose it and I don't think it was bought with Linux compatability in mind.
THAT is when I started using Ubuntu and that was about 5 years ago.
OTOH, sorting out drivers on a fresh copy of Windows can be quite a chore.
Quite simply YMMV and using monpolyware is no gaurantee.
Even Win7 still manages to screw up simple thin
Re:Um, wrong cause for the effect. (Score:5, Interesting)
This isn't a problem with the software, it's a problem with the economic system. Humans don't exist merely to fill jobs. On the contrary, jobs exist to fulfill humans.
If we've invented a technology that lets 1 person do the job of 2 people, then we've freed one person from the need to work. We've literally saved his life, or at least 40 hours a week of it. This is a good thing. The fact that this guy has to go supplicate himself to yet another capitalist in order to eat is simply indicative of the perverse incentives inherent in capitalism.
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If we increase productivity 100%, that doesn't mean one person gets to freeload off another's work
Of course it doesn't. What it means is that both people should share the available work, and share the products of it.
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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 prope
The way I see it (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:The way I see it (Score:4, Insightful)
Public Transportation (Score:3)
Sounds like public transportation cuts jobs. If everybody rode in buses or trains, the number of auto mechanics would go down drastically.
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Then we'll give them jobs stuffing people into the train cars.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pusher_(railway_station_attendant) [wikipedia.org]
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What do you think all the surveillance is for?
Open source also needs support (Score:3)
Being open source doesn't eliminate the need for support.
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:You know what costs jobs? (Score:5, Insightful)
Indeed. TFA is just a thinly veiled broken window fallacy.
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: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: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?
WTF (Score:4, Interesting)
Since when have jobs become the be-all and end-all of everything? Sometimes, technology means less human intervention is necessary. Deal with it.
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Since when have jobs become the be-all and end-all of everything?
Since capitalism became the be-all and end-all of everything.
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There's a third option, one which the so-called 1% are working hard to reach:
you can have a class of rich folks being served personally by the rest of the population.
And by "served personally" I exclude nothing that one human can do for another for money.
Progress (Score:3)
Yeah and so what?
One person not doing a redundant/unnecessary job is an opportunity for that one person to find another way to productively contribute to the community.
Bemoaning job loses in areas of progress and innovation? Lets bemoan the how computers superseded the profession of clerk.
Of course it does. (Score:5, Funny)
Electric lamps cost jobs when they were new, all those candlemakers in the street! The horrors! And the car companies put the buggy makers out of work, the whip manufacturers kaput, the ferriers all bankrupt.
Look at all that open source water that falls from the sky, depriving honest water sellers from making a living. Damn it, this is terrible! Nothing should be free, right?
Someone is complaining because Joe will do for free what Jim has been paid for? *sigh*. What a load of bull-oney.
School +Teachers -IT staff (Score:5, Insightful)
Egg Analogy (Score:5, Interesting)
Putting all your eggs in one basket is never a good idea.
Putting all your eggs in someone else's basket, one that is hosted God knows where, is an even worse idea.
Something tells me this cloud fad is just that; a passing trend. Oh, sure, non-technical management might love the idea of being able to cut staff and equipment costs by putting all their eggs in the cloud basket, but the first time said non-technical management is unable to access their remotely-stored eggs, for whatever reason, the shiny luster will fade and they'll come to the realization that the sysadmins they let go were far more valuable than previously thought.
Remote backups are always a good idea, but remote everything is not a winning strategy, IMO.
Yeah, we know; what's next? (Score:3)
A rising tide lifts all boats, but only if there are enough boats. What happens when automation removes all the jobs?
We know technology and efficiency remove the need for some jobs, and some people are out of work and have to do something else, but it's improving the standard of living, it's a good thing for society, Luddite fallacy, etc. all that. The thing is, history has shown than up till now, automation and technology may have eliminated some jobs but have created a roughly equal number of other jobs, such that people can still make enough money to support themselves and their families and enjoy this higher standard of living. What happens if automation removes jobs faster than it creates them? Or removes too many jobs all at once? I've read some stuff on post-labor economics, but it basically requires socializing or communizing (what a dirty word nowadays!!!) the ownership of the automation/technology for everyone to benefit, and I don't see that happening without a revolution of some sort.
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Let History be your guide to free markets (Score:3, Funny)
As western civilization has grown through the industrial revolution we have found that as technology replaces skill sets and workers it typically frees them up for more profitable work. A specific set of jobs is replaced, but those workers are then put to work on something that is ultimately more productive. In a command economy this would be a problem, in a capitalist economy those workers will be employed in the next role until that one is replaced as well.
The steam engine cost millions of jobs (Score:3)
so we should all go back to manual looms and employ millions.
The Law of Large Number (of People) (Score:3)
The Law of Large Number (of People).
If something happens once in a million it is often considered a rare event. But that is wrong. If something happens once in a million for a million people, then it has happened to more than 300 Americans. If it happens once a year for each person it has happened 6000 times in the last twenty years. That is for the Americans alone. If we expand to a larger area, Europe + South America + Asia, those rare events aren't so rare. (If something happens once in a million years, well that is another story...)
Good ideas are rare. How many times can one come up with a really, really good idea in your life-time? Well, let us say that 1% of the population can come up with one good idea during their life-time. With 100,000,000 people coming up with good ideas then there are many. Good ideas get stuck. And software doesn't change their ideas as often as hardware (due to API, ABIs, spaghetti-complexities, NP-hard solutions, etc), there will be a increased difficulty in finding new ideas. On top of that we have patents... Patents suck. With more than a million competent developers around? The Law of Large Numbers makes its voice heard, prima facie.
That doesn't mean that innovation is gone, only that it takes _new_ efforts to find what is relevant, in an ever increasing cyberspace. The diversity of the platforms change, too! Thefore there contact surfaces for new developers are expanding. Expanding developer universe? But the contact surfaces are there. Just harder to find. Still, they are there! Yes. Use them.
It could be said the Goal of Open Source... (Score:5, Interesting)
... is to cost IT jobs.
The whole point is so that you don't need to re-invent the wheel as much, because you can extend what you have been given instead. That any value any programmer gives to open source is available to all, not just the one company who paid the programmer. Less work to do is going to mean less jobs to do it.
Is this a bad thing? Hell No. Every time a job has been taken to benefit efficiency its gone hand in hand with higher quality of life across the board. Its bad for the individuals who don't or can't re-skill, but of benefit to society as a whole.
Quite frankly I feel that some of the software stack, from the core OS to the most common work programs, should be funded as open-source by governments. Its no different really than public roads. The government doesn't fund trucks, but it does fund the common infrastructure the trucks use. I don't think governments should fund games or media centers, but it would make sense to fund the OS and Office Suite.
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.
Of course it does (Score:3)
Let us remember that the money comes from somewhere.
Let us remember that most of the open source movement comes from a time where software was subsidized by other selling points.
A lot of software was developed by the old BELLs. They ran huge research facilities knowing they had constant cash flow. The government broke up the monopoly, spawned off the R&D labs... the rest is history.
Other kinds of open source eco-systems can from companies selling hugely expensive hardware.
You have to look at how your industry is funded.
Professionals like Doctors and lawyers protect their field via regulation and ensure their jobs and quality. Heck, you can't even write a prescription. Now, you can write a thousands pages on why this is done for quality... but it always seem to work out financially for them as well :P
Governments around the world basically gave a big 'screw you' to engineers. The exception being the military industry in the US.
The result is... what funds your industry? Proprietary software, licenses, strong arm business tactics of the evil corporation. There's a reason MS employes nearly 100K engineers, and has world class research facilities.
While people mock their suing of Android phone, I embrace it. Why on Earth do we, as an industry want less money coming into our industry? Free software... less money coming into our field... less jobs...
I don't pretend for one second to think corporations can about people. But a rich corporation which good stable cashflow keeps its employees well off.
And for anyone who talks about efficiency... let me just say... I don't care at this point. The world is not all about efficiency. Making a good living seems like a better idea. Doctors, lawyers, accountants, teachers, nurses, insurance people, bankers, trades people... all protect their field as much as possible. I'm not going to be the martyr in this world.
Broken window fallacy? Screw it. If everyone else is breaking windows to fund their field... I want to break windows as well to fund my field.
Under the current system... you are darn right... open source kills jobs.
Like my job? (Score:3)
"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: (Score:3)
Of course it costs jobs. That's what computers are for. If you don't free someone to be able to do something else, then your automation has failed.
Technology costs jobs. Any advancement in technology in fact. Remember the threshing machine riots? Technology makes increases efficiency and kills inefficient jobs.
PS: Free Markets and Central Planning do not imply capitalism or communism; More precisely, they imply communism or capitalism as much as capitalism implies democracy or communism/socialism implies dictatorship. In fact, the most successful elements of the Soviet industries relied heavily on competition - a trait associated with free markets
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: (Score:3)
That's not creating a job, that's creating a worker's skills.
Creating a job means that there is a need for work to be done, and a flow of money sufficient to hire somebody to do it.
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: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: (Score:3)
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: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.
Re: (Score:3)
Oh sorry, forgot to address the money: the money Photoshop customers would have sent to Adobe gets saved, and spent on something else more useful.
If you disagree, you're free to spend 10x as much for everything you buy. I'm sure merchants will be happy to take your money.
Re: (Score:3)
Simpler than that. A company can takes in some amount of money. If it spends less on office software, say, it can spend more on hiring people, produce more, and make more money. Net increase in jobs.
Re: (Score:3)
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.
Technically, that's not true. Money can very easily sit it wallets and bank accounts being economically rather inactive (especially as banks' willingness to lend is low at the mo). It doesn't disappear, but a $5 note that sits under a mattress forever is economically equivalent to it having disappeared. Economically, you might hope that in that case the saved money goes to paying down debt, again but that depends on the demographics of the customer base -- are the people saving the money the same people
Re: (Score:3)
Wait, what? How about this: instead of pirating software, you pay the software developer then the softwar
Re: (Score:3)
Exactly. This is why we need to privatize breathable air. By having all this air floating around that people can just breathe for free, this is costing jobs. People could be getting paid to provide bottled air to people.