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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."
It sure beats community service. I've long maintained that the way to learn to code is by coding. As someone who does hiring into programming positions, I know I would look highly at someone who spent his downtime working on OSS projects.
Bludgers is such a great word
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
If I were to be unemployed, this is exactly what I would do! Imagine having all this spare time (since you have no job) to work on any OSS project you want.
Having said that, the dole (what we call welfare here) is pretty low. I think its about 100USD a week? (for all those US people ou there)
Can your karma go above being Excellent?
Stoners and dole bludgers, what wonderful code they will create!
Remember, it takes 42 muscles to frown and only 4 to pull the trigger of a sniper rifle.
What happens when the aussie economy does better with a legion of state sponsored oss programmers? Awesome!
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 work in the Government Department that manages that Mutual Obligation policy and the main programmes around it. But I'm just an average public servant with an interest in IT - not a programmer or IT professional.
Since they're ask for help from people who are experienced in dealing with our Department, maybe this is a way I can properly contribute to an OSS project for the first time.
I would be surprised to see many takers for this scheme here. The IT job market is on the way up in Australia, we actually have a coding skills shortage. If you are thinking of getting involved, please look for a job instead.
Maybe they can hire some of our unemployed (pre-India) tech workers.
I think it's brilliant, but I don't think it'd be too long before some software consortium/lobby group/group of "concerned citizens" pulls out the whole "don't use government resources to promote the anti-competitive forces of OSS" argument. I'd bet you can expect to see legislation drafted within a year.
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.
Centrelink: so what jobs have you applied for in the last two weeks?
You: None, but i've been working on CommunityCode.org doing OSS development.
Centrelink: what?
You: I've been doing free software work to get experience and stay a productive member of society.
Centrelink: That's all well and good but I've got a job available at a chicken slaughterhouse I think you should apply for.
Groan.
Yet another blogger begging for an audience.
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.
It's like all the negative of outsourcing without the positive of improving someone else's economy.
Try not. Do or do not, there is no try.
-- Dr. Spock, stardate 2822-3.
http://australianit.news.com.au/articles/0,7204,15 083420%5E15306%5E%5Enbv%5E,00.html
Bill Gates is pushing for more H1-B's, even with the US computer engineer unemployment rate higher than the national average (which is the real reason colleges are seeing fewer apply for CS degrees). Beware Bill and every other software company out there, if the US ever followed suit. They might just get paid by the state to code your competition.
:D
I wish I could fill out an application to be an (oxymoron) paid/unemployed OSS worker.
Cleaning the net one sed at a time! s/sex/sermons/; s/hot/holy/; s/goats/thebible/; www.holysermonswiththebible.com
As a small business developer, I would love this sort of thing.
Quite often it's very hard to get people to do some work without forking out large amounts of money and you're not always sure about the end results (I've had some really terrible code handed in by contractors - worse than even mine).
I have quite a handful of projects, all openSource which would definately gain from this sort of interaction.
Paul.
I wouldn't mind being payed to live a VERY simple life and work on OSS projects that would benefit many. Many countries already have programs where they pay individuals to keep traditional arts alive (Chine/Japan) or keep ancient religion traditions alive (Isreal), so why not keep code alive?
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.
Could the volunteers write documentation, design web sites, graphics etc. There is a lot more to an OSS Project than just the pure code!
Noviota.
De Novo. Iota.
Starting Afresh. Very Small.
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.
The goal of the project was to provide cheap (free) hardware and software to underprivledged people in Australia. We used Debian for single installs, and the KDE wm.
It was a fantastic experience - I learnt all about the insides of computers and how to put them together, com ports, (seemingly) thousands of types of cards (video, audio, nics) and how to configure them, etc etc - all common knowledge ot people here, but you need to start somewhere...
We started a project to give thin clients away to poorer groups (libraries/community groups/refugee action collectives or whatever) which we built from the ground up using common knowledge and the wonderful xserver. I think they have since expanded the project, but now use Mandrake/driva.
A lot of the forced vollies didn't want to be there, but for those of us that did, it was great - I spent my first month testing printers, mice, speakers and doing the last check on systems going out the door...
There are plenty of these things around, and it sure beat weeding public gardens....
I can see it now...
1. OSS developers write custom management/accounting software for Welfare Program.
2. Welfare department welcomes cutomized management/accounting software with open arms (after all, they *sponsored* software).
3. OSS developers exploit a secret, built-in backdoor system
4. PROFIT!!!
No ???? needed
I'm glad to see on their web site that the program is open for 'any Free Software'. If it ever turned into an arrangement where you had to work on the projects they suggested, I'd have a real problem with it. If you were an Aussie company and wanted some software developed on the cheap, you'd just fire all of your developers. They'd be forced by Centrelink onto the work for the dole scheme, and end up doing your software development for you at $4/hour or whatever the effective rate is for the 'mutual obligation' scheme.
The work for the dole system has lots of potential to be misused. It's a good thing we can trust our government to only ever do good things...
if (unemployed) {
dole = dole * 2;
}
printPayslip();
Free Firefox news reader.
Wrong on both counts. Australians were never "exiled", we were and still are proud members of the British Commonwealth. And Australia was not originally discovered with the intent of making a penal colony, the convicts were sent a little later to perform labour and farm work, because England had no more room for them.
And as for us being a pack of halfwits, check out some famous Australian inventions. Not bad for a nation of 25 million people.
I hope they also include options for writing documentation and proof-reading.
That is an area that is often lacking in OSS projects.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
...if you can't get a very well paying job as a programmer in australia at the moment then you must be a technical moron who shouldn't be let anywhere near a computer or open source software. Companies are experiencing a massive skills shortage over here at the moment...the only people this is going to attract are morons that think they can get out of doing manual labour...and that means crap code.
What a wank
Mutual Obligation (aka work for the dole) is a system where after a certain time on unemployment payments, (note: disability and old age pensions are also "welfare"), the recipient must either, volenteer for a govt approved position or enrol in govt approved education (the govt then counts you as a student so thier unemployment figures look better). If a recipient does not comply then payments are curtailed or cut off. The idea is to give you some basic skills to make you more employable, it is not intended as punishment for being out of work. As far as I know picking up rubbish is NOT an approved activity.
Community service is a system where a court orders a petty criminal to do something unpleasant, like picking up rubbish from the roadside. The idea is that work is more equitable than fines. If you screw it up the court can inflict further punishment (eg: jail time).
"Dole bludger" is a derogatory term for someone who recieves unemployment payments, commonly used by self-rightous morons, right-wing politicians and current affairs reporters. All of whom have never had the soul destroying experience of dealing with a Centerlink office.
Centerlink does not run the work-for-the-dole program it is simply there to fuck up your payments and conduct endless "interviews" where they ask the same questions over and over again (eg: Are you having sex with your flatmate?). The irony of Centerlink is that it keeps thousands of unemployable busy bodies off the dole by giving them the job of handing it out.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
When I was unemployed, working on OSS projects gave me a purpose. After spending hours a day for nine months and slipping into depression, OSS gave me a new purpose, and a hope. I was keeping my skills sharp. I was contributing to the community. I had a reason to get up in the morning. OSS kept me sane when I thought I was going to go nuts.
I'm not a troll, but I play one on Slashdot.
In corporate America it is not going to help.
So, you are unemployed looking for a job. That is bad. Now you want to do something with OSS. You polish your skills, come up with something new while hoping that you'll get a job. What you don't understand that you're still nobody in a corporate world. You have better skills, but, guess what, the rest of the world will acquire those skills as well. If you're not willing to work for less, then you'll be replaced again. Go start working on another OSS project. Software engineers are quite common these days. Corporations will outsource and find workers willing to work for the lowest possible wage. As one CEO said, "...The problem with Asia is not the price, it's the fact that they [Indians, Chinese] can't work for free."
You can study and do whatever you want; however, as soon as there is somebody else who is willing to do the same for less money, you're out. Nobody gives a flying fuck if you are an OSS contributor or a genius if you don't fit the price tag. One of my friends is desperately looking for development gigs online. He found himself competing with Indians who are willing to work for less than $10/hr. Unless he lowers his price, he can't really work.
The sooner you realize your pathetic state, the better off you'll be. Instead of doing something that the rest of the world can do, try something new. Whatever you do, make sure that you have skills that are not related to IT. That will increase your chance of survival.