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The Unemployed Working on OSS Projects

Posted by samzenpus on from the good-idea dept.

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."

3 of 524 comments (clear)

  1. I think that it's great as an option by mph_az · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  2. Re:Unemployed coders in Australia??? by kieronb · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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...

  3. Seems like a plan by jonno317 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.