Open Source Globalization?

Carl Rosenberger asks: "In this article at IT Managers Journal [which is another part of OSTG, Slashdot's parent publishing company], db4objects CEO Christof Wittig speculates about the future effect of open source globalization on organizations and individuals. According to his opinion 'Engineers like globalization', although it may mean tougher worldwide competition for jobs. What is the opinion of Slashdot readers on this article? Is open source globalization going to happen? Will it make our jobs better or worse?" As the referenced article puts it, open source globalization is the ability to hire programmers from all over the globe to collaborate together on a single project with low overhead. Heck if it works for open source projects, why not for corporate software? Do you see the corporations you are familiar with embracing or fighting this concept?

Comments

Re:You get what you pay for?!?

[tf23]

Don't you mean 'lower cost of living countries'?

Actually, no, I didn't. I'm skeptical about the future of IT labor in countries which are established and have a much higher cost of living. When a US company can hire someone (with equivalent skills, knowledge, experience) across the globe at half my rate, and they can only do this because this person's cost of living isn't even half that of mine, that scares me.

you get someone that doesn't know what they are doing and needs to be helped constantly. The same as if you'd hired someone locally for that price.

True, geographic location doesn't limit boneheaded hiring decisions :)

Did they REALLY have a 'hardware crash'

As far as I could tell, yes. It turns out they were _not_ using CVS, SVN (tho both were recommended), and weren't backing anything up. The drive died on their development server, p00f, all gone. Moral of the story, as usual: backup!

they don't last long. I IT is booming overseas, and there's many more jobs than qualified people to fill them.

Sounds like history repeating itself huh? Just a few years ago it was the same here. Thankfully there's been a lot of burn out of the "underqualified" who tried to jump the IT bandwagon and never had the aptitude to begin with.

Re:It gores both ways

[chrismcdirty]

I really don't care about the 50-100 year scale. Is it a little selfish? Yes. But on that scale, it means that I went to college for no reason, since I could have gotten a low-paying job right out of high school. It would have skipped the few years in college and the few years working in the business only to have my job moved to somewhere the people will work for cheaper.

In the best case (50 years), I hopefully won't be working. But if I'm working low-paying jobs because the ones that I studied for are moving away/getting much more competition than anyone ever hoped for, I probably still will be working at that point, as I doubt that the cost of living will drop as quickly as the jobs move away.

In the worst case (100 years), I'll be dead.

So, no, I really don't care if the world becomes an equal playing field after 50-100 years if it means 50-100 years that my family and I suffer trying to make ends meet.