Slashdot Mirror
Does Open Source Software Cost Jobs?
jfruhlinger writes "John Spencer, a British blogger and tech educator, is convinced that free and open source software, which he's promoted for years, is costing IT jobs, as UK schools cut support staff no longer needed. But does the argument really hold up? It turns out that the services he's focused on are actually cloud services that are reducing the need for schools to provide their own tech infrastructure. Of couse, it's also true that many of those cloud services are themselves based on open source tech."
Efficiency is evil.
There isn't much need for cotton spinners or candlemakers any more either. Are we to mourn those jobs as well?
Hoist Number One and Number Six.
There are jobs in the cloud too. They're just smarter jobs, not I-run-a-server-in-my-spare-time-so-I'm-qualified jobs. And who says you don't need support staff for open source software anyway? Hell if anything you probably need more when people can't find that button that does that thing in Word but isn't there in open office.
Software that isn't designed to require constant hands-on maintenance costs jobs.
OSS is not always in that category, sadly.
You know what costs jobs? Efficiency. Economic efficiency always costs jobs. Often, it's creating other jobs elsewhere, but maybe not. Maybe it just means that job doesn't need to be done anymore.
You can create jobs by paying people to dig ditches and then fill them back in. Or you can create jobs by hiring support people you don't need, building infrastructure that can be handled more efficiently elsewhere, or paying people to write software that you don't need because an open source alternative is already available. It's the same as digging useless ditches.
Do you really want to create jobs? Great. Hire people to do something useful that can't be handled more efficiently by open source software. Or hire them to improve open source software-- god knows there's work to be done.
Obviously if less IT staff is required, the school can get more certified teachers. If you studied C.S. you might apply for a job as math teacher.
Support Eachother, Copy Dutch Property!
There was an American who was given a tour of a Chinese government work project. The project consisted of the construction of several dams, canals and a series of highways that were to join various isolated portions of the vast country together. The American observer, upon seeing the vast army of workers, asked the Chinese officials why there were so many shovels and no tractors. The official responded to this question by explaining that they were not building a dam but instead were creating jobs. The American, seeing the government officials great pride at just how many jobs they were creating, asked the obvious question; âoeWhy donâ(TM)t you give them spoons?â
Copied from http://andrewkboyle.com/2011/06/21/digging-with-spoons/, but he probably copied it from somewhere else.
Except that as things are, you might find yourself exploring the bottom of a garbage bin for some food. Eh, you get the point.
Once you've basically turned the computers into dumb terminals managed remotely and the only thing required is a connection to the net, you no longer need a network administrator.
... until one (or more) of those dumb terminals is unable to connect to its remote services. Then you'll be right back where you started, except now you have to pay that same netadmin outrageous consulting wages 'cuz he's not on the payroll.
Hindsight is always 20/20.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
Look at all the fletchers that had to find new lines of work when the cannon and flintlock were introduced. When cavalry abandoned horses and went to tanks and armored vehicles, I'm sure more than a few blacksmiths who had had a pretty fine job found themselves out on their asses.
Technology frequently reduces labor requirements. Civilization itself is built on that fact. The invention of agriculture allowed a certain percentage of the population the rather new and unique notion of "spare time", thus giving us writing, advanced mathematics, government and all the other trappings.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
The past is not the future.
The auto industry killed older jobs, but actually created more jobs than it killed, because it was, as yet, manual work to forge and assemble the many parts of an automobile.
But when the auto industry subsequently turned to the task of replacing its expensive manual laborers with relatively cheaper robotic workers, the auto industry killed its own jobs.
New industries have combined the two changes. They aren't merely replacing old jobs, they're replacing them with much more efficient new jobs, reducing the total workforce.
And then there's the irony of outsourcing, in which one local job is replaced by 2 or 3 or 5 ultra-cheap foreign jobs. But the people who are managing those jobs are realizing they can still replace their expensive workers with relatively cheaper robots.
The future isn't one of the fallacy of lamenting the buggy-whip. It's real mass unemployment, and the concentration of income and wealth in the hands of people who never actually used their hands to make a living in the first place.
Since when have jobs become the be-all and end-all of everything?
Since capitalism became the be-all and end-all of everything.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Did you do any of that? I bet you did less to access your conclusions that Milton did!
1) The WPA prolonged the Great Depression by about 7 extra years.
Show me one respected source saying so. And no, Gingrich and Palin's books don't count.
2) It wasn't something that really was within the mandate allowed by the Constitution.
Really? National, cross-state-border infrastructure would seem to be firmly in line with Section 8 of the US constitution.
3) At least for the debt, pain, etc. we GOT that standing infrastructure. The same can't be said for Obama's Stimulus, which seems to have produced LITTLE.
"Obama's Stimulus"... you mean the Bush Stimulus? Are you referring to the ERA of 2008, or the ARRA of 2009? If it's the latter, Obama signed it less than a month entering office. All the work on it was done months before by Congress, under the BUSH regime.
And in any event, the criticism of more than 90% of economists (read: any real economist that isn't a CATO Kochsucker) isn't that the ARRA was too large, but that it was too SMALL to have the desired effect and included too many bad tax breaks trying to get Republicans to sign on to the deal.
Indeed. Where I live, there's a ton of crumbling infrastructure. A good portion of it is roads that are 50+ years old. I've driven on WPA-produced roads through a neighboring state where the road - poured concrete - has literally turned itself to gravel over the years through neglect. Republican leaders of the state don't spend anything on maintenance, and their "solution" to the road becoming unsafe is - I'm not kidding - to just keep reducing the posted speed limit to something that's "safe for conditions" on an unmaintained road.
A frightening concept, given that the US interestate system (formally, the Dwight D. Eisenhower National System of Interstate and Defense Highways) was originally pitched to Congress under the military provisions of Section 8 of the Constitution, to provide for a network of roadways capable of moving military equipment from base to base. These days, it's basically a bare-minimum subsidy for the trucking industry, which has caused our national railway infrastructure to decay in ways that are completely unreasonable and results in far more smog output than there otherwise would be from cross-country freight.
Possibly, but just because some infrastructure spending by the government is good doesn't mean all of it is. In fact, only a tiny fraction of the Federal budget these days goes to those kinds of projects. Most of it goes to entitlements and the military, neither of which contributes to our economy (and the military is mostly doing things for our so-called "friends and allies"). And may I also point out that the kinds of infrastructure projects the WPA undertook wouldn't be possible today because of environmental concerns and extensive lawsuits? So, the "socialistic-communistic-pinko-liberal" politics with creating this infrastructure back then is the very same kind of "socialistic-communistic-pinko-liberal" politics that is preventing it today.
So, let's slash military and entitlement spending and focus on infrastructure again. Of course, that proposal attacks both parties' holy cows.
Paid for = jobs
free = no jobs
not really a hard concept
Actually, it is kinda hard. HTML and Apache are free and open, and yet they provided an explosion of jobs and practical use for businesses, mostly _because_ they're open.
that won't be true for long, catastrophically low infrastructure spending is allowing all of that WPA era infrastructure to crumble to dust
All of the WPA infrastructure is obsolete, and was actually obsolete before it was finished. Other than hiking trails thru the woods and stone guard rails in national parks, there is very little of our infrastructure need that is met by WPA projects. One does not build a four lane bridge over the Mississippi with "one man rocks".
Repairing even the wilderness trails is too expensive in a society that prefers to pay the skill-less to sit idle and collect the dole rather than actually lift a finger, let a lone a bag of cement.
The idea that you can put people to work in exchange for basic wages has been totally denigrated by the liberal entitlement mind set.
A common misconception related to piracy, foss, etc (anything where you are not paying) is that not paying = reducing the number of jobs. In reality, money doesn't just disappear, but rather it is spent elsewhere. Pirating software or using FOSS instead might cut some jobs in the software industry, but, for example, I might spend the money on more/better food, thus creating jobs in the food industry. Of course, the effect is largest with businesses which will almost always choose to spend money rather than save it.
Saying that FOSS or piracy or whatever is killing some industry or costing that industry jobs isn't necessarily false, but it doesn't hurt the economy. It's like when cars became popular. Sure, the horse-drawn carriage industry suffered, but the jobs and economy lost were made up for by the auto industry.
Do you realize that you're more racist than the people you are trying to smear?
If the richest 1% of Americans paid the same tax rates as the middle class, there would be no government budget deficit.
Do the math. That's wrong by a tremendous degree. You can download the data directly from the IRS. Go ahead.
Just think about all the people that could be employed making bottled breathable air, if people weren't allowed to just breathe naturally-occurring air.
This all goes back to the Broken Window Fallacy.
You saved money. How is that "trouble?" If you were "creating jobs" and all else were equal, that would have wasted money.
Whoever said that didn't understand anything about economics.
Free Markets vs Central Planning: Free Software is about extremified free markets. You hire anyone you want to get your maintenance, instead of a single source. This is basically opposition to commie ideals, IMHO (though I realize there are other ways to look at Communism; they just happen to be ways that I disagree with). On the commie centralization scale of color, GPLed software is blue as the zenith sky, proprietary is crimson as blood, and stuff like BSD is an intense purple blur as it bounces between the two on a case-by-case basis like a Republican talking about federal spending.
Control of the Means of Production: Free Software is about code reuse and code reuse is neutral toward this, but in a way that subverts the whole question with its explosive torrent of wealth. It's like millions of factories falling out of the sky, right during an argument between a Communist and Capitalist about who should own the previously-limited number of factories. Without the need for expensive capital, nobody cares who controls it. Both the management and workers look on helplessly, as whoever used to buy the old factories' output says they don't need either one of 'em anymore.
If paychecks for programming are your main source of income, then code reuse may be a Capitalist Running Dog Murder of Brotherhood. If software company dividends (as opposed to consulting fees) are your main source of income, then code reuse may be a Ruthless Communist Plot to Impurify your Precious Bodily Fluids. If you do something else but use software, then you're shrugging and saying "whatever" to those so last-century luddites.
"Believe me!" -- Donald Trump
"Repairing even the wilderness trails is too expensive in a society that prefers to pay the skill-less to sit idle and collect the dole rather than actually lift a finger, let a lone a bag of cement."
What a bunch of garbage. The vast majority of people have to work for a living and there are plenty of people without jobs who've been looking for ages. The whole IDEA that it's just 'lazyness' is simple minded bullshit.