Slashdot Mirror
Gates: Open Source Kills Jobs
theodp writes "On the Malaysian leg of a whirlwind Asian tour, Microsoft chairman Bill Gates voiced his concerns over the growing goodwill towards open source, especially in Asia, emphasizing how damaging open source software can be. 'If you don't want to create jobs or intellectual property, then there is a tendency to develop open source. It is not something you do as a day job. If you want to give it away, you work on it at night,' he said. Gates, who apparently has never contended with the horrors of a VB upgrade, when on to say that '[Open source] doesn't guarantee upward compatibility.'"
...that the company I'm working for now, The Ladders (theladders.com) finds great $100k+ jobs (kind of ironic that) and provides a weekly newsletter, and we have used almost exclusively open-source software to grow our business. Yes, I'm dropping a plug, but I want to emphasize that open-source software definitely provides jobs rather than takes them away. This is a fallacy that needs to be corrected and understood by business people--you can build businesses with open-source, and a lot of times, you can't build them without it.
Your '80s DOS program will probably run fine under Linux as well. In both cases, the 16-bit environment runs in a VM.
- Copyrights: open source software is still copyrighted as much as closed source software. He can't be talking about this sort of intellectual property.
- Patents: can also apply equally well to open or closed source software - indeed, some people call for software patents to explicitly include source code showing how the claimed "invention" is implemented.
- Trademarks: not really relevant; they're concerned with brand names and don't depend on if one chooses to share the underlying source code to a program or not.
- Trade secrets. Ah. We might be onto something here! Yes, something isn't a secret if you share it openly. Gee whizz - who'da thunk that?!
Yes, what Gates is saying is that you can't have trade secrets if you have open source software - only that's far too obvious a statement to make and any audience would see straight through it. So he uses the meta-FUD term "intellectual property" instead. What a sham. As with the RIAA and MPAA, what Microsoft really needs is a law that forbids circumventing an "effective" business model...
Sad as it is, some unions do use that argument. There is a nearby state park that has unionized maintenance workers. It is a several thousand acre park, which, due to budget cuts, only has two full time maintenance employees. Both guys work hard (maintaining roads grass, trash, buildings, etc,) but there is only so much two guys can do, and the parks trails are in terrible shape. Not just in need of mulch or stone, but washed out or nearly impassible due to overgrowth, downed trees, etc.
Some local businesses offered to donate tools and materials and some local Sierra Club (et al) members offered to volunteer their time to get the trials back into shape. Since it is a public park and is currently not useable for hiking by the public, I thought that was a great gesture from the community. Can you guess what heppened?
The state union told them to go stick it somewhere. Despite the fact that the two employees couldn't and wouldn't work on the trails - which is part of their job description - they wouldn't let anyone else do a "union job."
So the trails are still crap, now two years later.
A preposition is a terrible thing to end a sentence with.
Many, many tech companies don't pay dividends on stock (albeit in a liot of cases because they've yet to see their first thin dime of profit), however MS *does* pay dividends. Their first dividend was 8 cents in early 2003 and more recently they paid 16 cents.
... that the jobs I've had for the past 5 years or so have all been primarily developing software that runs on linux systems?
;-) You can't get software to work without a good understanding that computers don't respond to positive thinking or marketing, and such people will always be a tiny minority.
Funny thing is that these jobs have been paid for mostly by non-US companies who are trying to get out from under the thumb of either IBM or Microsoft (or both). And they're hiring Americans like me to help them do it.
A big selling point has been that N years from now I can guarantee that the software will still run and they'll still be able to read all their files. They've learned the hard way that this isn't always true with proprietary systems.
And I can easily explain to them how they can verify that there are no hidden tricks (trojans, backdoors, etc) in my code or in any of the lower-level software. Neither my code nor anything in "the system" can be sending their data off to some stranger's data warehouse. Granted, they'll have to keep around a staff of unix/linux geeks, who will both study the code and monitor the appropriate online fora. But they don't need to hire as many such geeks as they have on site now to keep their IBM/MS stuff running, so even that's a win.
Maybe eventually we'll see the day when all software has been written and no more is needed. But I suspect that day's still a long way off. And the world is growing more and more dependent on smaller and smaller computers to keep everything running.
So for the forseeable future, they'll still need lots of people who understand that, no matter what managers or marketing people say, 2+2 is always 4, not 5 or 3.95 or something desirable. (Except when it's 3.99999999998 of course, but any true geek will understand that, too.
So I'll predict that people with the twisted (i.e., logical) minds required by programming will continue to have jobs until long after all of us are gone.
Of course, we may all have to move to India or China, as the patent system shuts down software development in the Western world.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
Microsoft relies on their programs being a commodity, while OSS transforms software into a tool to achieve other goals.
SNIP
I interviewed the unix administrater at a local university as part of some report I had to write this year, and he told me how he takes code from the net, debuggs it for his architecture/configuration, and deploys it on the school's webservers. That's his whole job! And this job wouldn't exist if he was using Microsoft's generic offerings.
This is interesting. One of the real benefits I have noticed from my job is that the life of the network or systems architect becomes more interesting with OSS than with proprietary off-the-shelf-software (POTSS).
With POTSS, people more or less build networks using recipie-like instructions. While you *could* do that with OSS, it usually doesn;t happen. The reason is that suddenly the business hass access to *a lot* more capability for the same cost (including man-hours) and so you end up with people whos whole job is to build systems by stringing together lots of little pieces. This approach is also the UNIX paradigm, even with regard to proprietary software, though that usually only exists at the high-end.
What OSS does is bring the Power if high-end computing systems within reach of smaller players. This is why it is so powerful and why I think that it will win out over the long run.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP