The Unemployed Working on OSS Projects

Roger_Explosion writes "In Australia the unemployed have to fulfill a 'mutual obligation' requirement in order to receive welfare payments. What this means is that recipients of welfare payments have to be involved in some sort of activity that improves their chances of finding employment. Until now this has included various types of community service and training and education programs. Recently an organisation called CommunityCode has been established to allow recipients to fulfill this requirement by contributing to OSS projects."

Comments

I think that it's great as an option

[mph_az]

however, I think that if you make it mandatory (no idea if tfa says either way) then I think this could create some very serious damage to any open source unlucky enough to get coerced 'help'.

also, bear in mind that before you drool over the prospect of conscripts to do the grunt work in X.org or kde that any program worthwhile would probably allow them to choose which projects to help out in; and if they all decide that the best way to spend their time is to develop and perfect a tcl front end to cdrecord, that's their choice.

Frankly, I'd prefer that OSS help remain completely voluntary. Getting half-hearted help is worse than getting no help at all.

I don't think John Howard will approve

[Anonymous Coward]

Mutual Obligation has always been about punishment, not improving work prospects - unless the government knows there will soon be a massive demand for fence painters and tree planters.

The problem with this...

[wcitech]

The problem with this idea is that you will get the lower possible quality workmanship from the majority of people who contribute. Anybody who's ever done mandatory community services (and didn't get paid) can vouch that their heart wasn't in it. This might sound "fun" to an unemployed geek, but the quality of work is going to be signficantly lower than, say, somebody who WANTS to write OSS.

Re:Unemployed coders in Australia???

[kieronb]

On the other hand, this could be a great way to get people other than coders involved in OSS.

For example, all those projects where ther's little to no documentation because everyone involved is coding, not documenting? I'm sure there are lots of unemployed writers around.

Or projects that need to market themselves better, maybe need a sleeker looking interface or website or logo or whatever? Tap into the starving artist workforce...

Disturbing.

[Sheetrock]

This might seem like an odd perspective, but if people are put out of work by the availability of open source competition and are contributing to the problem simply to remain 'on the dole', doesn't this system effectively screw professional programmers?

It's like all the negative of outsourcing without the positive of improving someone else's economy.

Re:Disturbing.

[martinX]

Given that Aussie programmers would be more likely to be out of work because of (a) PHB buying off-the-shelf software (usually made in US) or (b) having their job outsourced to another country, I'd say that the number put out of work by OSS would be less than one. At a guess.

Re:Disturbing.

[mcrbids]

This might seem like an odd perspective, but if people are put out of work by the availability of open source competition and are contributing to the problem simply to remain 'on the dole', doesn't this system effectively screw professional programmers?

That's a pretty big "if"... Statements like this betray a basic concept that there's a total of NN software that needs to be developed, and that any amount satisfied by OSS is that much less bread to eat by developers

However, demand for software neither fixed nor predetermined. How many jobs have been lost as a result of the free availability of communications by the Internet? See, the cost of international, interpersonal communication dropped through the floor with the Internet - what about all those lost jobs in telecommunications?

I'm sure the Internet has cost SOME people their jobs, but how many new jobs popped up out of nowhere, doing web design, Intranet sites, database work, RPC and "middleware" based on this "free" Internet technology?

OSS works much the same way. Rather than create a condition of scarcity, it instead creates an environment of plenty - plenty of ideas to explore that otherwise wouldn't due to prohibitive cost, many of which will turn out to be very profitable.

Commonly addressed needs get commoditized by OSS software - Mail servers, databases, web servers, operating systems are all or are becoming commodities. The value, then, moves up the food chain a bit to providing services on top of these commodities.

You don't make much money selling tomatoes, but you might do very well selling food cooked with tomatoes at a restaurant. Same ideas with OSS software.

Seems like a plan

[jonno317]

It seems that the comments thus far have been centered around the idea that the unemployed are being forced to work on OSS. I think it is more the idea that working on OSS is an acceptable form of community service and the like. I don't think that the arguments against the idea because of the lack of volunteering hold much water because of this. Those who choose to work on OSS to fulfill their community service responsibilities would be just as much volunteers as the rest of the OSS community. It's no different from an OSS person putting their development onto their resume. It's just using the volunteer work on the software for dual purpose.

Does it have to be code?

[Noviota]

Could the volunteers write documentation, design web sites, graphics etc. There is a lot more to an OSS Project than just the pure code!

State sponsored OSS

[jesterzog]

What happens when the aussie economy does better with a legion of state sponsored oss programmers?

I think it's worth considering that for any company that produces closed source commercial software, there will probably be many others that could benefit from and improve their productivity with good open source software, but can't necessarily afford to pay for the developers themselves, nor the commercial counterparts.

Before jumpling to conclusions that it's state-sponsored competition, I think that this angle should be considered. The economy is made of more than just the commercial software production industry, just as the IT industry encompasses more than simply commercial software development.

Is this worth state sponsorship? Perhaps, or perhaps not, or maybe it's at the very least a good place for interested people to be while they're between paid work, as the article suggests.

Keep in mind that contributing to OSS while on a benefit doesn't release someone from their obligations of getting off the benefit, nor should it. It does give the appropriate people an activity in which they can maintain their skills whilst they're looking for other work. I think this organisation is mostly trying to formalise it, to make it a credible and understood activity for government agencies.

When they say 'coding'

[Trogre]

I hope they also include options for writing documentation and proof-reading.

That is an area that is often lacking in OSS projects.