Why Software Is Eating the World

An anonymous reader writes "Web browser pioneer Marc Andreessen writes in the Wall Street Journal that software is 'eating the world.' He argues that software's importance to the economy is being underestimated, and will become much more evident in the near future. Quoting: 'But too much of the debate is still around financial valuation, as opposed to the underlying intrinsic value of the best of Silicon Valley's new companies. My own theory is that we are in the middle of a dramatic and broad technological and economic shift in which software companies are poised to take over large swathes of the economy. More and more major businesses and industries are being run on software and delivered as online services—from movies to agriculture to national defense. Many of the winners are Silicon Valley-style entrepreneurial technology companies that are invading and overturning established industry structures. Over the next 10 years, I expect many more industries to be disrupted by software, with new world-beating Silicon Valley companies doing the disruption in more cases than not.'"

Comments

Developers still 2nd class citizens

[digitallife]

And yet developers are still treated like second class citizens in far too many organizations. The fact is that most management simply does not have any appreciation or understanding of good coding practices, instead using short term metrics to try to recognize valuable developers... Such as how little they are willing to work for. Just recently I read a comment here on slashdot from some developer who said his whole team had been working 12-16 hour days for a year and a half with no extra pay... Because it would "secure" their future with the company. They are in for a very sad surprise.

Re:Developers still 2nd class citizens

[Cryacin]

The problem is that business values the player who brings home the bear, not those making spears.

The trick is to brand the quality and purpose of your tools to your market, like the sales staff, the operations guys etc as a vital tool to bring home the bear. A very famous tool maker once said "God created all men equal, Col. Colt made them equal".

Re:Developers still 2nd class citizens

[roman_mir]

In early 1920s cars were taking over the world.

Assembly workers were still 2nd class citizens.

--

Those who know "HOW" will always have employment.

Those who know "WHY" will always be employers.

Re:Developers still 2nd class citizens

[RogerWilco]

I think the problem is that software developers aren't organized.

I don't just mean something like a labour union. It could also be like the medics, civil engineers and lawyers, with widely regarded exams.

We let ourselves be treated like this.

I think it's because of three reasons:
1) Unlike medics and civil engineers, there usually is no responsibility for failure.
2) Software developers as a whole aren't the most social.
3) Software engineers usually don't have money as their prime motivation.

Re:Developers still 2nd class citizens

[StripedCow]

I think developers still have enough reason to form a union. For example, if there was a union, it could very effectively ban the use of IE6 on the web, or it could put an end to the anti-competitive moves of apple, or force the W3C/WHATWG to give up their hijacking of web-standards.

Re:Developers still 2nd class citizens

[billcopc]

As they should be. Once you acknowledge the fact that money is an artificial construct, the only realization is that accountants truly create nothing in the enterprise. They don't produce a saleable asset. They don't offer any services to the clients.

If you run a company without an accountant, the only bad thing that will happen is the tax man will get angry.

If you run a company without software, you have no company.

Re:Developers still 2nd class citizens

[jhoegl]

Yes, but the company constantly creates the "all hands on deck" situation to make you work more.

Re:Developers still 2nd class citizens

[garyebickford]

I have been in two recruiting situations in which the fact that the company's software developers were unionized was a major factor in my decision not to go there. If nothing else, my own observations have shown that if a company's policies are so screwed up that the workers feel the need for a union I don't want to work there; and also that in some cases (for some particularly in the northeast US) many unions seem to still have a greedy, self-destructive attitude that continues to drive entire industries out of business, and throw artificial barriers between (for example) firefighters and police against the people, making it difficult for individual members to maintain a constructive relationship with their populace - their ultimate employers.

Having said that, I am aware that in some industries unions have a valuable role. I grew up in the construction business, and for certain trades the union hiring halls act in a sense as brokers for their members, and provide somewhat of a guarantee that their tradesmen are competent. And back in the 1980s (IIRC) in Portland OR the metal fabricating companies and the metal workers unions became concerned that the schools were no longer producing potential apprentices, and worked together to build an associate degree program in metal working. I'm not a musician, but from my limited long-ago experience, there are similar benefits with the musicians' union.

I've suggested privately that one possibly beneficial union role would be as the representative and hiring agency for Central and South American nationals coming over the border to work in low-level jobs in the US - much like the construction trades unions. The union could maintain responsibility for the individuals, protection of them against unfair practices, and assisting in handling their legal and financial relations. I haven't thought this through thoroughly but it seems like it might help.

Re:Developers still 2nd class citizens

[interval1066]

Not in my experience, not true.The companies I've worked for have tried to avoid those situations where possible as developer wear-out was constantly being addressed and avoided. And that's been true for just about every shop I've worked in. You sound like you've been in a few third-world sweat shops.

Re:Developers still 2nd class citizens

[roman_mir]

Software developers are assembly line workers. They do the same proven thing over and over and over and over again, there is nothing new invented anywhere in software development.

Systems architecture is closer to engineering.

Business analysis is understanding the needs of specific business function and translating it into overall systems requirements.

Running a business that needs any of the above is answering the question: why being in this business is more profitable than being in any other business with the same investment capital.

Re:Developers still 2nd class citizens

[BoberFett]

You've gotten lucky. There are a lot of horrible shops where it's always crunch time. And usually because of poor decisions by upper management that could have been prevented with a little bit of planning.

Re:Developers still 2nd class citizens

[mikael]

Some IT departments bill by the hour. So there is pressure to get some feature implemented as quickly as possible as well as do *exactly* what the customer wants, along with a need to make as few changes as possible to minimize breaking the code. In the short-term this saves costs. In the long-term this makes code unwieldy, monolithic and harder to maintain.

It's strange how we evolved C to C++ to make use of features like inheritance, polymorphism, pointers, templates and design patterns in order to encourage code reuse, then move over to other languages because doing all that design takes up too much time.

Re:Developers still 2nd class citizens

[phantomfive]

Because it would "secure" their future with the company.

This is their problem. As soon as someone starts saying, "You need to work more than 8 hours for no extra pay," that's when you start looking for another job. Don't let people treat you like that.

There is no 'job security,' especially in the software industry. You need to view yourself as a service provider, who is providing a service to a company who is willing to pay a good price for the service. When they are no longer willing to pay, that's fine, take your service elsewhere. There ARE others.

Security in our industry comes from being able to find another job. As long as you are capable of that, you will have no problem.

Re:Developers still 2nd class citizens

[dwreid]

It's been my experience that accountants are the people with the most distance between them and reality. A number of years ago I worked for a computer company that was experiencing 30%+ annual growth. The president and co-founder decided to retire. The company moved the CFO into the president's position. Mr brilliant bean counter decided to make the company more profitable by terminating all of the sales force. Those hefty salaries and bonuses were a huge cost center. Now the balance sheet looked all profitable. Six months later the company was GONE and he never knew why sales stopped. He actually said, "but we still have the marketing department. I don't understand." As the years have passed I've seen this kind of tunnel vision from the accounting departments over and over and over. The stories are legion.

Re:Developers still 2nd class citizens

[roman_mir]

usually because of poor decisions by upper management that could have been prevented with a little bit of planning.

- it seems to you to be that way, in reality in many cases it's not about poor decisions by upper management, but it is about competition with the other guy.

Competition is about who is going to land the contract, it's about who is going to get that VC money, it's about whether you can get that bank loan, etc.

If you didn't realize this yet, I'll educate you: it is all about money.

There is always not enough money to hire more people, and it's not due to poor planning, it's because of various laws that make it very expensive hiring people. If you hire somebody, you can't just lay them off once the crunch time is over and in software it's also not exactly the simplest task, to bring somebody in for a very short time period. However if there were no such things as labor regulations, minimum wage, etc. People could be hired at very low salaries to sit there, learn the process, people who don't even have any education.

There are millions upon millions of unemployed Americans, yet you have crunch times and you have to do insane overtime and burn out, and at the end, guess what, your job will still be outsourced somewhere with fewer regulations.

The decisions in front of top management is all about money, and often you can't just pour money into a problem because you are living on a slim margin. You have to balance the accounts receivables and accounts payables and you have to come up with all the salaries, with all the payments for all the expenses, with all the loan interest etc.etc. And you have to satisfy your customer and you have to win over the competition.

If you think there is just a 'little bit of planning' that can always be done to prevent crunch time, think again. You can't run a shop with negative margins, but if you try to not have crunch time, then you can't run the shop with positive margins at all due to all of the regulations.

The side problem with this is: there are millions of unemployed people with no money to get a better education and with no opportunity to try and get themselves employed at very low prices, so they could be trained at those low prices and they could be effectively on staff for some time at least, until they gain experience to get a better job, but giving the opportunity to the employer to even out the man power at any moment.

It is really necessary for any business, but especially for business with as many unknowns in projects as there are in software business, to be able to hire at very very low prices, but government prevents this very practice, preventing people from having opportunities of studying new stuff without attending any colleges and even being paid a very small amount for this opportunity.

The jobs are and will continue leaving countries with high regulations and taxes to countries with low regulations and taxes for these reasons and you will continue having those crunch times.

Re:Developers still 2nd class citizens

[cartman]

I see I've been modded down to "troll" by pointing out something which nobody could seriously dispute.

Such as how little they are willing to work for. Just recently I read a comment here on slashdot from some developer who said his whole team had been working 12-16 hour days for a year and a half with no extra pay...

That's just ridiculous and silly.

It's extremely easy to find a job as a programmer right now which pays highish wages relative to other jobs, and which doesn't require working 12-16 hour days. Although there is significant unemployment right now, that unemployment is almost entirely among the working class, and among people who used to be employed in construction etc, and among millenials. The unemployment rate among experienced programmers is 4% at present, meaning unemployment in that sector is almost entirely frictional. At my company, for example, we're trying to find qualified people to hire, but it's virtually impossible. In other words, the labor market for programmers is as tight as it's ever been, with the possible exception of the 1999-2000 timeframe.

Whoever is working 12-16 hour days for no additional money, for a year and a half, has made a silly choice, and has done himself harm for no reason whatsoever. He has many other easy alternatives, which he chose not to investigate or pursue.

Of course, there are many people in this economy who lack skills or experience, and who are seriously suffering. But here we're getting complaints from programmers who have careers in a field with 4% unemployment.

One needs only to type "software engineer pay" into google and come up with links like this one which clearly indicate that someone with a Bachelor's degree makes $60k-$120k per year (not including benefits), Or I could type "unemployment sector" and find that the unemployment rate for programmers is half the national average and that: "With an unemployment rate of under 4% in the tech sector, there’s a shortage of qualified technology professionals, TechFlash reports." Or I could type into google a query about how many hours most programmers work, and find from the Bureau of Labor Statistics that: "Most software engineers and programmers work 40 hours a week, but about 15 percent of software engineers and 11 percent of programmers worked more than 50 hours a week in 2008" which obviously means that working 12-16 hour days is rare. All this took about 60 seconds of research, but perhaps the people working 12-16 hour days never bothered to type these things into google?

Part of living in a capitalist economy involves looking at the options available to you and selecting the best one given your circumstances. I know there is always some rare person who says something like: "I paid $45,000 for a $25,000 car, because I didn't even bother to walk across the street to some other dealership to look," but it's rare and signifies nothing other than that some lone person got ripped off.

The odd thing is that there's constant complaining on slashdot among people, who are essentially highly privileged or fortunate workers. Programmers make $60-$120k for a Bachelor's degree and work 40 hours per week (which apparently is average, according to the BLS) with an unemployment rate of 4%. Clearly programmers are in the top 1% of workers worldwide, by a very comfortable margin, and are within the top 10% even among the rich countries. Nevertheless, they constantly insist on slashdot that they deserve much more than this and that they're the modern equivalent of slaves, that laws should be passed favoring them even more and that they should form unions etc.

I realize this will be modded down to "troll". Of course, there are a few modders here (not most of them, of course) who think that anything which challenges any idea they have in their heads is a troll. Ohwell...

I don't believe it

[maxwell demon]

You cannot virtually grow food. In the end, humans need something real to eat.

Re:I don't believe it

[neokushan]

That's bullcrap, my computer is chocked full of cookies and every time I visit a website, it grows more!

Re:I don't believe it

[FoolishOwl]

Last I checked, only about 5% of people in the US are involved in agriculture. And much of agriculture and food production is already heavily automated. For that matter, so is heavy industry in general.

Mass production depends upon repetitive work that is readily automated. Automation multiplies the effect of human creativity, meaning that you need fewer workers to produce the same amount. People have the idea that US doesn't produce anything real anymore, when the US still dominates global industrial production. But if you walk into an actual working factory, you see dozens of workers, not the hundreds or more it took to do the same work a generation ago.

More and more, I think the real challenge is reorganizing society on the basis of a recognition that we ought to be doing a lot less work, that we're producing things needed only in order to support unnecessarily high levels of productivity, and that we'd all be better off if we spent less time and energy on production.

Re:I don't believe it

[theurge14]

Try running a large scale ag business without software.

Re:I don't believe it

[Anthony Mouse]

More and more, I think the real challenge is reorganizing society on the basis of a recognition that we ought to be doing a lot less work, that we're producing things needed only in order to support unnecessarily high levels of productivity, and that we'd all be better off if we spent less time and energy on production.

I'm going to be pessimistic here. The problem is this: It's more efficient to have fewer skilled workers who each work for more hours. Given two alternatives, a company will almost always want to pay a single employee $40X for five days / 40 hours of work rather than paying five employees $8X for one day each, because it reduces training costs, benefit costs, etc. And there are plenty of people who are willing to work five days a week for five times the cash. But as automation reduces the number of employees required to produce all that is necessary for the world, it creates a large body of individuals who can't be gainfully employed doing anything productive, because all the production that is necessary is being done by a small fraction of the population.

You end up with a world where there exists a great deal of scarcity, but it isn't a scarcity of labor. It's a scarcity of suitable land, raw materials, energy, etc. You have a mass of unemployed people whose labor is not required to produce anything and so have no way to make a living, but can't acquire anything because products and services still require scarce non-labor resources. And those people aren't exactly willing to stand around while they slowly starve to death, or even go without a second vacation home, so they find ways to acquire resources other than by being productive: Arbitrage, government pork, litigation, war, fraud, nepotism, etc.

And so we "create jobs" for people who are good at stealing the wealth of productive people: High frequency traders, lobbyists, lawyers, defense contractors, criminals, PHBs, etc. The asshats generate their own spawn: If your competitor is making trades faster than you, you need to waste a thousand programmer hours making yours 1ms faster. If your opponent has more lobbyists or lawyers or soldiers than you, you don't have enough. High crime rates lead to purveyors of security theater snake oil. The CEO's nephew can hire all his incompetent drinking buddies to be your bosses.

The trouble is that there is a limit to the amount of labor required to produce everything we actually need, but there is no limit to the amount of human resources we can throw at fighting over the allocation of raw materials that are scarce for reasons entirely unrelated to a shortage of labor. Moreover, the person who retires to the beach to sip drinks out of glasses with little pink umbrellas without wanting to fight anyone for anything is the person who loses all their savings in the stock market, misses weighing in on the vote to deprive them of their social insurance, loses their house to a con man and gets drafted into the oil wars.

Re:Not likely

[maxwell demon]

And what exactly does this software run on?

The Matrix, of course. :-)

Software is the means, not the end

[Anonymous Coward]

There's certainly a revolution happening but it's not about software companies. That's confusing the food industry with the refrigeration industry. The winners of tomorrow are firms that can use software to create knowledge pools that can exploit new markets successfully. Future digital businesses may look more like 4chan than like IBM or Oracle.

Its economic importance is being underestimated?

[White Flame]

Does this guy work for the BSA?

and some places have little to no QA + poor IT

[Joe_Dragon]

and some places have little to no QA + poor IT support as well.

A lot of falls on management who does not know that much about IT.

Re:and some places have little to no QA + poor IT

[hedwards]

That's socialist talk buddy. Next thing you're going to suggest that executives shouldn't get obscene bonuses for running their company into the ground.

Answered your own question

[petes_PoV]

management simply does not have any appreciation or understanding of good coding practices

There are no measures - just like there is no objective measurement of good prose. As a consequence management places value on things that it CAN measure: cost, time, manpower, bugs, lines of code. What all this means is that without any way to measure what is "good" code, or to quantify its "goodness" all the coding practices are really just as much hot air as any other management fad.

Back to the reason why developers are considered 2nd class citizens (actually, fourth class: customers are second class citizens, prospective customers are first class and suppliers are third class). The reason is that they produce nothing with any measurable value. Sure the software they write SOMETIMES adds to a company's profits, but the link between a specific piece of code and a line in the P&L is tenuous at best and non-existent most of the time. If you want to improve your worth (to the company, to society, to yourself) come up with a way of demonstrating the hard-currency value of your code: how handling a particular exception is worth $500 and how reading that input data is worth $2000. When you can do that, there's be some value to employing developers - until then, they're just a cost item.

Re:Answered your own question

[Billly Gates]

Management hates I.T. because their bosses are accountants who view it as a cost center rather than an asset. The problem is the bean counters are all upper management in most fortune 1,000 companies today and frankly do not care about productivity as programmers waste money anyway.

Many are switching to clouds and switching from C#/C++ to Excel. If Excel was fine for these bean counters then it is fine for real programming too. Then they do not have to waste it on I.T. and these silly contracptions called databases.

Re:Answered your own question

[Will.Woodhull]

There are plenty of ways to do this kind of quality measurement and any competent management would be at least peripherally aware of these, know how to get more information about any of them, and be able to implement them. This is child's play with a product like code which can be directly inspected. Various forms of peer review, even very fancy double blind peer review systems, are easily constructed and managed with a few spreadsheets.

What management needs to know is fairly simple: who are their best 20% of coders, and who are their worst 20%. And within the bottom 20%, who are the jokers who not only write crappy code, but have shown through the way that they have participated in the peer review process that they do not know good code when they see it. Replace those few with new blood asap. Just doing that is well worth the cost of implementing the peer review process. (As a wag, the cost of implementing a double blind peer review system where each coder is required to do one review each month could increase direct coding costs by 5% per year, but it would decrease the much greater costs of debugging and patching production code by much more than that.)

Additional benefits a savvy company would think very hard about doing: token bonuses for those who are consistently in the Top Twenty, and some way to use the best of the best as consultants on any decisions that might impact the coders. Including changes in the cafeteria menu. Happy galley slaves will row your boat faster.

Re:Answered your own question

[Kjella]

What management needs to know is fairly simple: who are their best 20% of coders, and who are their worst 20%.

There's really no such thing as a double blind peer review system if I know who's been working that code or I can recognize the coder's function/variable naming, style and commentary. Maybe if you have a large pool of coders this is possible, but in a smaller company it'd only cause noise I think. Don't forget that the manager usually can't tell if the reviews are honest, if you say it's working but has poor structure / design / maintainability / performance / whatever he'll probably buy it. There's a reason we have meta-moderation here at slashdot, you might need something similar.

Also, you never know how much these people have really screwed up or been screwed over in design meetings, I've been told to implement things in ways I wouldn't want to but it's my job and so I've tried. You could ding me on the code review, but the critic would be sorely misplaced.

Confirmation Bias

[Mozai]

THIS JUST IN
An expert of [field of study] believes [field of study] will change the world.
Also emphasizes that other people are not taking [field of study] seriously.

Re:FOSS undermines your theory

[Anonymous Coward]

My own theory is that we are in the middle of a dramatic and broad technological and economic shit in which software companies are poised to take over large swathes of the economy.

Fixed that for you. If there's any way that software is eating the world, it's stifling innovation through bullshit patent wars. From Apple and Oracle all the way down to the bogus holding firms in East Texas.

-- Ethanol-fueled

The world is eating food

[Anonymous Coward]

My own theory is that we are in the middle of a dramatic and broad technological and economic shift in which food companies are poised to take over large swathes of the economy. More and more major businesses and industries are being run on food, from movies to software to national defense...

Software is eating the world since a long time

[drolli]

DSPs killed of many analog designs.

MC and PLCs killed of digital controls

image recognition killed of many specialized sensing techniques.

People building control panels are replaces by gui designers.

Wiring of sensors in industrial plants is replaced by a single digital bus.

Re:Software is eating the world since a long time

[mikael]

You can go back further:

1850's:
Punched cards and weaving looms killed off skilled craftspeople (Luddites)

1950's
Punched cards and electro-mechanical computers killed off rooms of accountants and clerks.
Automated electromechanical (Strowger) telephone exchanges kill off telephone switchboard operators.

1980's
Laser printers killed off print technicans and departments (boiler plate technicians and strippers).
BT's System X killed off electro-mechanical exchanges
Word processors/Desktop PC's killed off the need for every manager to have a secretary (but they became admins, executaries and PA's).
(some managers thought having to learn to typewriting skills meant they would become glorified typists).
E-mail and Fax killed off Telex (Paper tape with punched holes in it).

Group E-mail killed off steep pyramid hierachical management chains (director/assistant director/deputy assistant director/senior manager/ associate manager/ manager/junior manager/trainee manager/senior engineer/engineer/junior engineer)

1990's
ATM killed off System X
TCP/IP killed off ATM
Broadband killed off ISDN / X.25 / dial-up modems
Windows MFC/C++ killed off X-windows/Motif/ C programming
Windows 95/NT + HAL kills off the need for users to fiddle about with IRQ's and motherboard settings
Gameboy killed off the custom electronic game (Magic Merlin).

2000's

USB kills off serial/parallel/keyboard ports
memory sticks kill off 3.5"/5.25" floppy disks
Internet killed off the dominance of the newspapers over opinion and perception of world events.
High density disk drives 100+ Gigabytes kill off low density disk drives (Megabytes)
PDA killed off the Filofax

We knew the digital revolution was coming 30 years ago, since the 1980's:

"The Coming of the Chip" by Anthony Hyman, "The Computer Revolution", and "When the Chips are down" by BBC Horizon really document the era
of the 1980's, and the fear that everyone had.

In each case, the authors knew that once you had the means of transferring documents, text, video and images at the speed of light back and forth through a communications link, there was no restriction where that work would be done, and that it usually ended up going wherever costs were lowest.

Re:FOSS undermines your theory

[santosh.k83]

The Slashdot FAQ does claim that the vast majority of Slashdot users are from the USA. Though I'm one of the recent exceptions, I personally don't find it all that US centric, with some exceptions like articles on creationism. As for software eating up the world, the only thing eating up the world is entropy, and it's inexorable.

We still don't understand the scale of it

[petes_PoV]

We think we're pretty good at "doing" software. That because it's been around for 50 or more years, we've basically got it cracked and we know all the problems.

We don't

If we were to liken the software "revolution" to the change that the world saw when printing was invented/developed/popularised, we're not at the end of that process - we're still futzing around trying to design workable printing presses and wondering why our ink doesn't stick to the dried leaves we call paper.

Software isn't a process that we've mastered, we've barely started to use it. Hell, we don't even have a functional language to write our stuff in: one that deals with the abstractions and realities of the world we live in, as the spoken and written languages we use everyday allow us to communicate with each other..

Re:Not like this is completely new...

[mikael]

Sounds like California - they were wanting to make cost savings by reducing overtime payments or salary grades. It sounded simple, just update the Excel spreadsheet or whatever table they used. Didn't realize that the entire pay scale system was hard-coded in Cobol, as nested if-then-else statements. Every new employment grade had resulted in a new set of conditional statements. Just having a special exemption for a single year would have meant duplicating everything.

their bosses are accountants ...

[petes_PoV]

All accountants do is measure some metrics, convert those measurements into a dollar value in a sort of "normalisation" process and then seek to maximise that value.

That's fine. So long as the things they assign monetary value to are real (not necessarily tangible, but aren't simply fictional or some sort of trick/device) and the valuation process makes sense. The problem with software is that it's not well matched to this measuring / valuing / optimising mechanism.

if the software industry is to thrive, something has to give. It probably won't be the way accountancy works - as it's too successful (or maybe just entrenched) in all other branches of industry. Obviously it evolves and accounting rules and practices change, but until the world of software development finds a way to produce inputs that the accountants can deal with, we're stuck trying to justify our existence in a world that can't value what we do.

Re:We need more Free Software

[FoolishOwl]

I've thought that the reason for the triumph of the bourgeoisie in Europe is that in the middle ages, the aristocracy needed the products of the towns -- but the towns didn't need the aristocracy, and managed to obtain some independence of the aristocracy. This meant that, later on, when there were direct clashes, the aristocracy could never win, because they depended upon the products of the towns to control the towns.

So, I've thought that by analogy, if we want to move past capitalism, we want to develop facets of the economy which are socially owned, upon which capitalism will come to depend, but which do not depend upon capitalism. And it occurred to me that there are only a few entities in evidence that look like this, and the strongest (and the one I could most likely find a way to play a part in) was free software.

About the time I was thinking this, I was reading Free Software, Free Society and Open Sources: Voices from the Open Source Revolution. The former appealed to my radical left sensibilities (and my hankering for heterodoxy), and the latter, while a good read, irritated me in that almost every essay made a point of stating that open source software was not socialist.

It occurred to me, however, that if the idea I had in mind was to work at all, it would be necessary to both maintain the independence of free software, and to encourage businesses and governments to use it; thus, some sort of compromise between the (apparent) two approaches would be necessary.

Re:Of course, you have to fight for your rights

[cartman]

If you think about it, you are better off in the International Union of Elevator Constructors or the International Brotherhood Of Electrical Workers, than being a rank and file coder.

You don't seriously think this. Working class employees are treated far worse, have fewer options, make far less money, get fewer benefits, are less secure, and have less rewarding work than almost any white-collar employees. Everyone know this. Why would people spend $100k on college education, and lose years of earnings, with no promise of a career, if everyone wanted a blue-collar job. Unions didn't work out for the employees of GM, or for that matter, almost any other unionized industry. What's in demand are skills and no level of organization will ever compensate for the lack of them.

This is Just Cover for HP Dropping Hardware

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

I'm surprised no one has already mentioned this -- Andresson is on the board of directors for HP. Last week HP announced they were dropping most hardware and converting to a "software" company. I think it's bullshit and so did a lot of people as their share price dropped 20% on the news.

So, Marc is doing spin control by trying to sell HP's new plan in the form of a editorial in the Wall-Street Journal. Don't try to read anything deeper into it than that.