Slashdot Mirror
Linux Geeks To Take Over World
B'Trey writes "According to this story by Rob Enderle of TechNewsWorld, Linux geeks are one of the most powerful forces in the world and are set to become the next Mob. Does this mean I get to wear a cool fedora and carry my distro CDs in a violin case?"
The article tells a good story about how Linux is at the center of a massive nexus of script-kiddies who are eager to destroy anyone standing in their way. And how unions are powerful things.
I don't think, however, that this has much to do with IT unionization.
There will always be vandals. There will always be workers who would benefit from a union. The story failed to connect these ideas.
Meh.
I want to mod up +1 Funny whoever modded this as +1 Insightful.
Let's look at the whole concept of an IT union. That's what the article is really trying to get at, though it seems to be unable to connect the dots.
Unions have historically been necessary in professions where the employees have been at a severe economic disadvantage to the employer. In such cases, the employee would suffer more greatly by being punished by the employer than by doing some odious task. A great example is the auto industry where thousands upon thousands of workers would be literally unable to support themselves if the factory left town. The management is able to use this knowledge and leverage it into forcing longer hours for worse pay upon the workers. It is only through unionization and the threat of collective/mass work stoppage that the management is kept in check.
In the modern age, unions have been a device to demand better treatment for worse productivity. They have ceased to be helpful guardians of employee rights and have become oppressive bureaucracies in their own right. This is not really a good direction, IMO.
If the primary goal of a union ought to be the protection of worker rights and the establishment of a partnership in which both management and the employees receive favorable outcomes. It should seek to balance the power of the employers with the needs of the employees.
However in the software world, the employees are not hamstrung by monetary concerns. Any Joe Programmer can pick up a cheap $200 bare bones PC and a copy of Linux and be programming the next great thing. He doesn't need management to do this.
So management, despite its seeming power, does not actually have very much leverage over any IT employee. It is not the case that if the company packs up and leaves town that the computer engineer is suddenly out on his ass. Rather, he still has the tools at his disposal to continue productive work on his own.
Because of this natural balance in the IT industry, it will never make sense to have an industry-wide union.
(Taken from a presentation I made explaining open source as a development model for large businesses)...
A common misconception about open source is that because it is "free" it is somehow a charity operation where programmers work bene-vola because they want "to contribute".
This is, however, wrong. When Adam Smith said: "It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest", he was accurately describing a world in which self-interest creates mutually-beneficial structures.
Open source contributors are attracted for different reasons, depending on how far they understand and identify with the technology at hand. We can identify the self-interest of each role, while seeing that the overall structure serves everyone:
* "Users" will evangelise (seeking security in the company of others using the same technology).
* "Power users" will help others who have problems (seeking the kudos that comes from helping others).
* "Pundits" will discuss the technology in public forums (seeking the fame that comes from being able to accurately identify trends and future winners).
* "Insiders" will take on parts of the testing process (seeking better familiarity with a technology that may become an important part of their skill set).
* "Players" will delve into the technology itself, taking on smaller roles in the process (seeking the kudos and fame that can come from being on a winning team).
* "Key players" will take on major roles in the project (seeking to impose their ideas, turn a small project into a major success, or otherwise earn a global reputation).
* "Patrons" will provide financial support to the project (looking to sell services, often to the users, that require the technology to succeed and be widely used).
The naive view of open source focuses only on the players, ignoring the wider economy of interests. A successful open source project must attract and support all these classes of people (and others, such as the "troll", who vocally attacks the project in public forums, thus stiffening the resolve of the users and pundits who defend it).
Thus we can understand the needs of each role:
* Users need a pleasant and impressive product so they can feel proud about showing it to others.
* Power users need forums and mailing lists where they can answer questions.
* Pundits need pre-packaged press releases, insider tips, and the occasional free lunch. Some controversy also helps.
* Insiders need regular releases, frequent improvements, and forums where they can propose ideas for the project.
* Players need extension frameworks where they can write their (often sub-standard) code without affecting the primary project.
* Key players need badges of membership, and access to the right tools and support.
* Patrons need a high-quality and stable product that supports their services and additional products.
The only people working full time, and usually professionally, on an open source project are the key players. All the others will take part in the project as a side-effect of their on-going work or hobbies.
While a traditional software company must pay everyone in this economy except the users, an open source economy must only pay the key players, who make up perhaps 2-5% of the total. Further, the key players will work for significantly less than the market rate, since they also derive a real benefit from working on successful projects, which I call the open source "payload". The most important part of a future programmer's CV is the section titled "Open Source Projects". This is the payload. It translates directly into dollars, proportional to the impact and importance of the open source projects involved.
When compensation plus payload does not cover the cost of working on a project (in terms of loss of compensation for alternative work), the key player will suffer "burnout" after 12-18 months, more or less depending on the person's tenacity.
This individual is just twisting his loss of power as a journalist versus the power the public has gained to share and express their own thoughts and form their own opinions. When we as individuals now agree on a subject we are no longer isolated with the only public opinion being the one paid for by vested interests.
Yes, the public landscape has changed, freespeak is gaining influence and it is FREE becuase no individual, religion, group, union, government, corporation or media empire controls it. We are all just individuals with a equal voice and this is what they fear the most not becuase of what we gain but because it diminishes their voice regardless of how much money they have.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
Well how about this: a mailing list to inform members of when it is time to write e-mails to their bosses, and when it is time to strike. Otherwise, it doesn't do anything.
Basically when IBM decides that it's time to take pensions away, the mailing list activates, and all employees send an e-mail to Sam Palmisano at the same time, threatening to strike if the pensions are taken away.
It's just coordination, that's all. If just one guy sends the e-mail to Sam, he gets fired. If everyone sends an e-mail at the same time, nobody gets fired.
Fascism trolls keeping me up every night. When I starts a preachin', he HITS ME WITH HIS REICH!
I once worked at a place as a contractor (non-union) *snip* my expirences in dealing with the Union were not pleasent.
Of course they weren't. You were a competitor. Did the union hire you? If not, it was management making an end-run around the union. I wouldn't expect a union to *let* you do their work, let alone *help* you.
I was not allowed to open a server case
I wouldn't let an outside contractor (let alone a competitor) touch my servers either. But, then again, I'm competent to fix my own problems. Dunno about this "union" in question.
I could not pull my network cable from the back of my PC
Ditto. Of course, I merely advise people not to go unplugging things instead of prohibiting them. But I still get to laugh at them and clean up the mess when something explodes. I've seen people plug telephones into network cards, network cables into telephones, fuck-up all the little pins on the monitor when plugging it in, and, (really this is the best), try to swap monitors without changing the scan rate, letting out the magic smoke in the process. The best way to avoid all that is to just mandate that only competent people can work on computers, period.
Of course, the other good way is to take the "dentist" approach to professional services: belittle people when they fuck things up. Think about it: if you told your dentist "I tried to do my own root-canal and chipped a tooth" he would call you an idiot to your face, and proceed to hurt you even more than usual while fixing it. Even if you just tell him you haven't been brushing, you can probably expect a mild chiding. If you told him "I went to Larry the dentist instead of you last time, because he charges less. But he fucked up my gums, so, could you fix them?" you'd be lucky to wake up from the laughing gas.
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
Enderle seems to have picked his side
Is there a question?
The guy gave a keynote speach at SCO forum titled "Free Software and the Idiots Who Buy it". He states that "Steve Ballmer invested a great deal in our company on my word"
You can change seems to is.
Enderle is a clown, with powertrip fantasies only a nerd could muster. Linux geeks can't even all agree on how to pronounce "Linux", let alone the kind of organization he talks about. Most of the effects of this "organization" (of what, exactly?) on his chosen example, SCO, were perpetrated by IBM's lawyers, or SCO itself. The DDos attacks pale in comparison to the spambot zombie waves across the Net every day, and the rest of it is a joke, too. Linux geeks are a vast, arguing herd of cats, and the "power vacuum" he describes in the leadership is likely to remain more like a quantum foam than an office into which someone ever moves.
--
make install -not war
You know, when I noticed this man's name in the summary I felt an instinctive, atypical desire to submit a slanderous post about him without even reading the article. It's amazing how intuition can save time. I don't know who this guy is or why I remember him as a total asshole, but the two sentences you've quoted reassure my faith in my own foggy notions. Dear Lord, what a shithead.
I have a question for you? Do you actually know any Indian developers that live and work in India and other places in the world?
Why do americans look down on unions?
Speaking for myself, my hatred of these things comes not from a blind prejudice, but from experience. Like many things, the idea of The Union is a great one, in theory, but when I (a co-op/intern, getting my first "real-world" experience) has to teach the union laborers how to do their jobs, or worse do it for them because they're lazy/don't care, and have undo job security, one tends to see the light.
Unions provide a security blanket that allows people to get by with a minimalist attitude. In the environmental department of a power plant, that is most definitely a bad thing.
Next, unions give bargaining power to laborers; I'm all for that. When the workers abuse this power to force unfair conditions on the business/plant/etc, however, it's the same abuse of power that existed before unions, only in the opposite direction.
I'm fully aware that my exerience is limited, but it's easy to find more than a few instances where such abuse of power exists/has existed.
Laziness, check. Impatience, check. Hubris, double check!