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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.