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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."
free = no jobs
not really a hard concept
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.
The way I see it, technology helps us get machines to do the mundane so we can spend our time exploring and creating.
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.
I only please one person per day. Today is not your day. Tomorrow isn't looking good either. - Scott Adams
Sounds like public transportation cuts jobs. If everybody rode in buses or trains, the number of auto mechanics would go down drastically.
Being open source doesn't eliminate the need for support.
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.
Since when have jobs become the be-all and end-all of everything? Sometimes, technology means less human intervention is necessary. Deal with it.
It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
- E. Debs
Yeah and so what?
One person not doing a redundant/unnecessary job is an opportunity for that one person to find another way to productively contribute to the community.
Bemoaning job loses in areas of progress and innovation? Lets bemoan the how computers superseded the profession of clerk.
Electric lamps cost jobs when they were new, all those candlemakers in the street! The horrors! And the car companies put the buggy makers out of work, the whip manufacturers kaput, the ferriers all bankrupt.
Look at all that open source water that falls from the sky, depriving honest water sellers from making a living. Damn it, this is terrible! Nothing should be free, right?
Someone is complaining because Joe will do for free what Jim has been paid for? *sigh*. What a load of bull-oney.
Free Martian Whores!
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!
Cutting *support* because of the absence of licensing cost makes no sense at all. Heck, if some people are to believed costs for support would increase when using open source.
no, didn't RTFA and don't intend to either. Even if we're talking about "the cloud" it's still not a cost. It's simply organizations trading costly in-house knowhow for cheaper solutions leaving them at the mercy of others, who in theory (if aiming at providing the same level of support) would be better through their "synergies" (more experienced sysadmins or whatnot) - which, if the world was right, should serve to increase the status of work involved in cloud "solutions".
http://quoteinvestigator.com/2011/10/10/spoons-shovels/
At one of our dinners, Milton recalled traveling to an Asian country in the 1960s and visiting a worksite where a new canal was being built. He was shocked to see that, instead of modern tractors and earth movers, the workers had shovels. He asked why there were so few machines. The government bureaucrat explained: "You don’t understand. This is a jobs program." To which Milton replied: "Oh, I thought you were trying to build a canal. If it’s jobs you want, then you should give these workers spoons, not shovels."
The question is stupid whether it costs jobs. Should people waste time re-producing the wheel? Should we continue to produce buggy whips? Advancements have
always "cost jobs". But the fact is it frees people to move onto new inventions and add productivity rather than living in the past.
So let us get rid of tractors. Then if we get rid of horse teams, there will be lots of hand plowing jobs.
Wallah...no unemployment.
Of course open source software costs jobs. You could employ a small army to re-impliment everything each time you needed something expanded. Or you could use a really horrible system and employ an army of IT workers to deal with it and work around it.
Open source software (and quality software in general) makes using these tools easier and cheaper. And so, for any given job, there's less work to do. Which means people hired to do the job. Which means less jobs.
And that's a good thing. That's efficiency. That's extra productiveness. But don't weep for the software engineers, because there seems to be a nigh infinate amount of problems to fix and streamline and automate.
Enabling people to do things more efficiently means that you don't need to pay as many people to do the same job. Money that would have been spent reinventing the wheel can now be spent on other things, like the actual goal of the company/organization, or paying IT to improve their services rather than just tread water.
Increases in efficiency are the only thing that have ever raised the standard of living. What is tricky is how the fruits of these improvements are distributed. That is where concern and energy should be placed, not trying to hold back progress.
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.
Putting all your eggs in one basket is never a good idea.
Putting all your eggs in someone else's basket, one that is hosted God knows where, is an even worse idea.
Something tells me this cloud fad is just that; a passing trend. Oh, sure, non-technical management might love the idea of being able to cut staff and equipment costs by putting all their eggs in the cloud basket, but the first time said non-technical management is unable to access their remotely-stored eggs, for whatever reason, the shiny luster will fade and they'll come to the realization that the sysadmins they let go were far more valuable than previously thought.
Remote backups are always a good idea, but remote everything is not a winning strategy, IMO.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
Hmm.. When I wanted to learn how to create a compiler I studied the gcc source! When I wanted to study kernel development I studied the Linux Kernel source. The knowledge that I picked up from my study has helped me along my career. I'd say OpenSource has created jobs.
Jobs saved millions of dollars by leveraging Open Source software at Apple, and before that at NeXT.
*ducks*
...a repeat from 1998?
Furries make the internet go.
No, it creates jobs. Just elsewhere.
Read up on the Broken window fallacy:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window
I'd also suggest to read Henry Hazlitt's classic Economics in One Lesson. If nothing else it is a rather entertaining read.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economics_in_One_Lesson
His main point is that you have to consider the whole picture, not just your own widget factory.
~.~
I'm a peripheral visionary.
Every change "costs" jobs. Heck, a couple of years ago it was 70% farming/agriculture - want to go back there?
Jobs don't get "lost". New job opportunities pop up. Progress implies shifting of jobs. So can we please stop being all stupid about it?
Cloud services are going to redistribute IT needs. I believe companies can benefit by running their own Cloud. Security and Control is lost if you use a cloud offered by a vendor. Outsourcing overseas didn't work so is Cloud another attempt ? I really don't want to see the dumbing down of IT. If I ran a company, even if my data was encrypted, I'd prefer to have my data in my data center and an encrypted copy offsite for DR purposes. I think the Bean Counters of the World are going to leverage the Cloud for their own evil purposes. That being said I advise all of us to keep our data centers internal.
Some of our developers here at my company like to use open source software. If anything it provides me more work everyday to support that crap than regularly licensed products. John Spencer is out to lunch.
new plan from congress to ban mechanical advantage. Also, electricity "isn't caused by humans"
also with the cloud lack of local control is part of it.
Now say some says run adobe CS 5 or auto cad with our remote cloud based systems saving you the cost of buying high end systems.
Now that may work at least for some time up till they force you to the next ver breaking older date files / makeing so you can't save files in a old ver.
Or say NO we can't install plug in X for you.
Some cloud systems rips your data off.
You have to download and reload data to move it from one app to a other as some cloud systems run each app in it's own VM that resets to the image on each boot.
The bandwidth needs add up fast.
That's not creating a job, that's creating a worker's skills.
Creating a job means that there is a need for work to be done, and a flow of money sufficient to hire somebody to do it.
I read an earlier post from you that mentioned your wife. How the hell did you ever get married? My neighbor's ten year old daughter can write a more coherent paragraph than these two posts. Your writing sounds like something out of Dr. Seuss.
A rising tide lifts all boats, but only if there are enough boats. What happens when automation removes all the jobs?
We know technology and efficiency remove the need for some jobs, and some people are out of work and have to do something else, but it's improving the standard of living, it's a good thing for society, Luddite fallacy, etc. all that. The thing is, history has shown than up till now, automation and technology may have eliminated some jobs but have created a roughly equal number of other jobs, such that people can still make enough money to support themselves and their families and enjoy this higher standard of living. What happens if automation removes jobs faster than it creates them? Or removes too many jobs all at once? I've read some stuff on post-labor economics, but it basically requires socializing or communizing (what a dirty word nowadays!!!) the ownership of the automation/technology for everyone to benefit, and I don't see that happening without a revolution of some sort.
As western civilization has grown through the industrial revolution we have found that as technology replaces skill sets and workers it typically frees them up for more profitable work. A specific set of jobs is replaced, but those workers are then put to work on something that is ultimately more productive. In a command economy this would be a problem, in a capitalist economy those workers will be employed in the next role until that one is replaced as well.
KK4SFV
i seen this coming years ago.. enjoy! a billion people with the same skill set.. good going!
Just wait till cars make themselves and we have to fight to keep human jobs on the assembly line.. and when computers can fix themselves..
What do we do once our technology replaces us?
Well, I can see for an individual who wants an income in the IT sector it may be the right question for performing sub-optimization for that individual.
But looking at it from a macro-perspective, it is interesting to observe how the skewed distribution of wealth makes "workers" so eager to work and find new ways to spend all our waking moments generating even more wealth for the super-rich. It is a perfectly self-enforcing system where as soon as a "worker" has nothing to do (s)he focuses all energy of finding new ways to please the overlords. Because if we are not working, there is no income. And somehow nothing less than working 100% seems to cut it in order to live the lives we have come to expect. So we willingly spend most of our lives working until we are old and die, and most of the output of that work trickles up the pyramid to that "1%" group.
So instead of celebrating efficiency ("hooray, now we can all spend a little less time working without sacrificing our lifestyle"), we start worrying about this type of progress. Just shows that humanity has still not figured out the right way to organize as a society. Democracy and capitalism seems to be the best answer we have come up with so far, but these days with the Internet etc. it is becoming all the more visible how plagued our Western systems are by corruption and self-serving people in positions of power.
He would be against books because it contains too many ideas that can be freely reused. He would oppose forums on the internet because reviews from citizens cannot have a good quality and are bad for profession newspaper reviewers. And webshops should be forbidden: Bad for old fashion shops. And this email stuff costs too many jobs at the postal services.
Stop the efficiency!
nosig today
so we should all go back to manual looms and employ millions.
What about the increased demand for mechanics to work on the dramatically increased number of buses and trains
The argument is that enough buses to carry 10,000 people require fewer mechanics than enough cars to carry 10,000 people.
Unfortunately, that seems to be the big problem right now; we're caught in a positive feedback loop
So dramatically increased efficiency leads to surplus labor. So if we take it as an axiom of capitalism that one must sell one's labor to buy food and shelter, how do we keep those negatively affected by this surplus from turning to crime?
The Law of Large Number (of People).
If something happens once in a million it is often considered a rare event. But that is wrong. If something happens once in a million for a million people, then it has happened to more than 300 Americans. If it happens once a year for each person it has happened 6000 times in the last twenty years. That is for the Americans alone. If we expand to a larger area, Europe + South America + Asia, those rare events aren't so rare. (If something happens once in a million years, well that is another story...)
Good ideas are rare. How many times can one come up with a really, really good idea in your life-time? Well, let us say that 1% of the population can come up with one good idea during their life-time. With 100,000,000 people coming up with good ideas then there are many. Good ideas get stuck. And software doesn't change their ideas as often as hardware (due to API, ABIs, spaghetti-complexities, NP-hard solutions, etc), there will be a increased difficulty in finding new ideas. On top of that we have patents... Patents suck. With more than a million competent developers around? The Law of Large Numbers makes its voice heard, prima facie.
That doesn't mean that innovation is gone, only that it takes _new_ efforts to find what is relevant, in an ever increasing cyberspace. The diversity of the platforms change, too! Thefore there contact surfaces for new developers are expanding. Expanding developer universe? But the contact surfaces are there. Just harder to find. Still, they are there! Yes. Use them.
For every job that is eliminated through the advance of technology more than one new job is created. In addition the value of the job created is higher than the old job, and the new job is more engaging.
This is utter nonsense, I see no correlation between these two. I think he's got an ulterior job on to sell something else ...
Well, except that that's not true at all.
If you only track the jobs at the firm bearing the costs, then lower TCO could mean more internal jobs but enough less payment to outside firms to more than counteract the increase to the internal costs (or it could mean more internal jobs at enough lower pay per job without any change to external payments.)
If you track jobs with the vendors paid by the firm in question (and their vendors, and theirs, etc., until you get to the ultimate suppliers of labor or raw materials), then less payment to those firms could mean:
1. Fewer jobs at those firms,
2. More jobs at those firms at lower wages, or
3. No change in jobs, but reduced non-labor costs (taxes, raw material extraction charges, profits distributed to capital holders [because of changes in which vendors are involved, and what their particular practice in returning profits to owners is], etc.)
If you go out even further to include indirect impacts in the economy outside of the direct supply chain, then improving TCO means improving efficiency in the industry in which the TCO has been lowered, which can have many effects -- one of the most obvious being driving additional capital investment to that industry and creating more jobs in it.
At any level of analysis, "lower TCO = fewer jobs" is not a valid generalizations (though it may sometimes be the case if you bound the universe of analysis properly.)
All software costs jobs. There is some set of functions we need the computer to do. Eventually, the way in which they are done will be "settled" and we'll reach an innovation plateau. It will seem like everything that could be invented has been invented. For quite some time we've already been at the re-make stage. Language X is just Lisp with some syntax. Office suite B has 90% of what you do in office suite A and you can work around the missing 10%. OS B has to have some subset of Unix. In the end, we won't even think about the OS. People will look back and say, "People actually argued about OS?". It would be like us arguing about the best way to demodulate AM or FM signals (people did argue about stuff like that when radio was new).
All the people who design FM demodulators are unemployed. Some day, all the people who write OSs will be unemployed too. It'll be something like Unix. It'll just be there. Nobody will argue about it.
John Spencer needs to read "IT Does Not Matter" by Nicholas G. Carr. Carr makes several points but the one I remember most is this: " So what should companies do? From a practical standpoint, the most important lesson to be learned from earlier infrastructural technologies may be this: When a resource becomes essential to competition but inconsequential to strategy, the risks it creates become more important than the advantages it provides. Think of electricity. Today, no company builds its business strategy around its electricity usage, but even a brief lapse in supply can be devastating." Open source is the advantage that if missed companies die. If taken advantage of early can be a competitive advantage and that advantage can live until others catch up. This is not a problem with job loss as much as it is with the inability for companies to cope in the right way by taking advantage of the extra help in other ways. http://www.proxios.net/pdf/ITDoesn'tMatter.pdf
Just look at the number of projects getting a scope cut. Lack of budget, lack of time, you name it.
Open-source is meant to help us actually finish our projects. Stop doing the same CRUD stuff over and over, and focus on making the user happy.
Server Apache/2.2.3 (Red Hat)
X-Powered-By PHP/5.2.17
'Nuff said.
Let's blame the real culprit...population.
Sure, things here and there contribute to the amount of jobs available in each sector. But does anyone ever stop to think about the fact that there are just too many people on this planet?
We need a good global disaster to spur job growth.
... is to cost IT jobs.
The whole point is so that you don't need to re-invent the wheel as much, because you can extend what you have been given instead. That any value any programmer gives to open source is available to all, not just the one company who paid the programmer. Less work to do is going to mean less jobs to do it.
Is this a bad thing? Hell No. Every time a job has been taken to benefit efficiency its gone hand in hand with higher quality of life across the board. Its bad for the individuals who don't or can't re-skill, but of benefit to society as a whole.
Quite frankly I feel that some of the software stack, from the core OS to the most common work programs, should be funded as open-source by governments. Its no different really than public roads. The government doesn't fund trucks, but it does fund the common infrastructure the trucks use. I don't think governments should fund games or media centers, but it would make sense to fund the OS and Office Suite.
Do you construct and type your own sentences?
Marshall Brain's Manna describes two possible social results of automation. Not a long read, and a good starting point for considering the effects of total automation.
every year all over the world in the name of down sizing because of bad management or poor products, jobs lost from OSS is negligible. So what if jobs are lost, if I create an OSS project that takes off and some other business goes under because of that its not my problem.
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
It's rather a shame for the IT guy who's out of work, but these are smart people who can get another job easily enough. Schools have never been a major part of IT employment. 15 years ago, most schools would have had all their IT handled by one of the teachers.
The money saved can and will be spent somewhere else. This will mean another aspect of these kids' education is improved. They might even produce another job.
We can't and shouldn't hold back technology to preserve jobs. That's extremely short sighted thinking.
If it wasn't for Open Source, I'd be bust by now. I'm a graphics artist, and thanks to Open Source I managed to work my way up from poverty to success.
I could offer cheaper labor and in-house services to small rising companies that needed ad-work due to lower software costs, and that made me very popular. As well as getting much faster help from idealistic programmers that took pride in correcting bugs rather than trying to protect a corporate image (and thus deny every bug report ever given to them).
3 times HURRAH for Open Source! It's the new way of life.
What this world is coming to - is for you and me to decide.
Lacking a Cowboy Neal option
He's blaming Open Source for automation.
But it doesn't matter if the "cloud" vendor is running Apache or IIS or whatever. Services will be consolidated and automated. It's about the economies of scale.
He talks about being "an Open Source apologist". Fuck that. That's all you need to read to know that that article is going to be worthless.
He's confusing:
#1. Open Source (Free) Software.
#2. Consolidation / Automation.
#3. The recession / depression / economic restructuring / whatever.
#4. Hardware / software / services (his example of Apple).
And then he complains about the loss of "fat profits". But he doesn't understand that someone has to PAY those "fat profits".
automation and technology costs jobs. So what?? Isn't job a slavery?? and machines will help us to fight the slavery. What must be changed is the system. If a corporate develops a new invention that replaces human based jobs then it must be accountable for it and pay the equivalent in terms of salaries of lost jobs. Isn't this fair in an ideal world?? What's next ... corporates should be controlled by governments, that means every government should be a shareholder and should distribute dividends to the citizen ... in this way we close the loop and we have a solution to the crisis and to the unemployment!! Viva la Revolucion!!
Quite frankly, a lot of open source looks like a way to get free labor from gullible college kids for corporations. If I can download a CRM system and use it with little modification, why pay to develop one? As far as I can tell, the biggest beneficiary of open source looks to be small to medium "for profit" businesses. If I was opening an office tomorrow, I would outfit any PCs I might need with Mint, OpenOffice and The Gimp for promotional art. For anything more specialized, I'd pay the slightly over minimum wage kid in the back to search for a free version.
I might pay for a lot of things, but software probably wouldn't be one of them.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
Did you do any of that? I bet you did less to access your conclusions that Milton did!
Well, unless he copied his conclusions he probably did more since it looks as if Milton just copied the story from somewhere else. If you look at the Quote Investigator link you'll note that an incredibly similar story originated in Alberta in 1935. The Milton version is certainly far better put but it is not the original source.
Why not blame cloud-based pay software? Or why not blame all software? Or all technology?
no. The more commodity software exists the more possibility there is to use it to build actual needed business solutions.
You can't handle the truth.
Let us remember that the money comes from somewhere.
Let us remember that most of the open source movement comes from a time where software was subsidized by other selling points.
A lot of software was developed by the old BELLs. They ran huge research facilities knowing they had constant cash flow. The government broke up the monopoly, spawned off the R&D labs... the rest is history.
Other kinds of open source eco-systems can from companies selling hugely expensive hardware.
You have to look at how your industry is funded.
Professionals like Doctors and lawyers protect their field via regulation and ensure their jobs and quality. Heck, you can't even write a prescription. Now, you can write a thousands pages on why this is done for quality... but it always seem to work out financially for them as well :P
Governments around the world basically gave a big 'screw you' to engineers. The exception being the military industry in the US.
The result is... what funds your industry? Proprietary software, licenses, strong arm business tactics of the evil corporation. There's a reason MS employes nearly 100K engineers, and has world class research facilities.
While people mock their suing of Android phone, I embrace it. Why on Earth do we, as an industry want less money coming into our industry? Free software... less money coming into our field... less jobs...
I don't pretend for one second to think corporations can about people. But a rich corporation which good stable cashflow keeps its employees well off.
And for anyone who talks about efficiency... let me just say... I don't care at this point. The world is not all about efficiency. Making a good living seems like a better idea. Doctors, lawyers, accountants, teachers, nurses, insurance people, bankers, trades people... all protect their field as much as possible. I'm not going to be the martyr in this world.
Broken window fallacy? Screw it. If everyone else is breaking windows to fund their field... I want to break windows as well to fund my field.
Under the current system... you are darn right... open source kills jobs.
While I think that open source software is cool, and allows people to make contributions to the collective benefit of everyone: I don't know that it necessarily costs jobs, but I think it does cost "higher paying software engineering jobs". When a company tries to use an open source project to make money, the company generally will use the strategy of adding some infrastructure around the project and then making the money on the support side. It means that the value of the quality of your engineering staff is lessened to a degree, and jobs are created on the sales and support side. So while I have gratitude toward anyone who contributes their art of any kind to the greater good, I don't think it's the best strategy for software engineers themselves to be successful in the long term.
Since the invention of the wheel, we have had some jobs being irrelevant as a consequence of human ingenuity. Those inventions have also created jobs. To quantify how many jobs each invention has created or destroyed is beside the point. Inventions (Either paid for or given away, including software) change the world and the way we live. We can sit in a corner and complain that old days were better and make a sincere effort to live in caves or we can move into the twenty first century and take advantage of the new opportunities. Your choice. Either way, stop complaining, because people that are taking advantage of the new opportunities are not going to stop to listen to you. We are building a newer shinier better world and clinging to the old one will not do.
I've been promoting open source software in my line of work for over an decade. I've been seeing way different scarecrows drawn; corporations are afraid that they will have to hire more people to deal with open source solutions - expensive, skilled people. They would prefer "black box" solutions that can be deployed and maintained by low cost, low skill people. Sad thing is, that companies really will have to buy the work of skilled people from somewhere to succeed - having own skilled people is always cheaper, and they will have good insight on company services as whole, unlike temporarily hired staff.
Very likely this is just FUD from major software producers; corporations should see their solutions as light to maintain, cheap and effective solutions. Working class people should see open source software as an threat for their employment.
As I see writing comments like this an threat to *my* employment, I am doing this anonymously.
Linux, PHP, Apache, MySQL, Drupal, Wordpress...I get paid quite well for using that lot, thank you very much, and I still hand code 95% of the new stuff I do, they just make my life easier. The very question sounds like somebody who's trying to sell old software rather than write new stuff.
Please consider this account deleted, I just can't be bothered with the spam anymore.
You obviously were'nt around for the cutover from paper based systems to computer based systems, which of course resulted in a massive reduction in staff numbers for non-it staff.
Magical Technology (Score:?)
by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 28, @07:15PM
Why can't private industry get it's hands on this magical technology that schools apparently have in the form of self-managing workstations? People imagine you can just turn hundreds of client computers over to K-12 school kids and as long as they don't use Windows they'll never require any management, support, administration...
This despite the coddling these very same folks need to provide the open source computers they and their own children use.
Network infrastructure? It's set and forget.
Five to ten year-old client computers? They never fail, and the kids will take excellent care of those machines (and parents will be delighted that the school district is still using P4 computers with 512M RAM and slowly leaking capacitors...
And of course, you need to filter Internet access? No sweat, the free version of Untangle can take care of that - no need for sophisticated commercial solutions - kids have no interest in working around such filters...
Up next, Khan Academy will remove the need for math teachers...
Ken
It doesn't matter anymore, he's dead
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
also with the cloud lack of local control is part of it.
Now say some says run adobe CS 5 or auto cad with our remote cloud based systems saving you the cost of buying high end systems.
Now that may work at least for some time up till they force you to the next ver breaking older date files / makeing so you can't save files in a old ver.
But you're going to get screwed over that way anyway. You got yourself into trouble the day you locked your key data up in a format that only a tools from a single commercial vendor can read. They've already got your data hostage; they've just not jacked up the prices to the max yet. The cloud doesn't change that much; you still want to manage your backups yourself and you want your data in open formats (or at the very least where there are multiple competing commercial vendors).
Or say NO we can't install plug in X for you.
Some cloud systems rips your data off.
You have to download and reload data to move it from one app to a other as some cloud systems run each app in it's own VM that resets to the image on each boot.
The bandwidth needs add up fast.
So you can use the cloud badly (and you're a cheap-ass when it comes to bandwidth). Guess that means the cloud is terrible, impossible for anyone to use. Guess all those people using it successfully and efficiently are either stooges or fooling themselves, right? Or maybe, just maybe, you're over-projecting here a little.
"Little does he know, but there is no 'I' in 'Idiot'!"
...but only in the same sense that the Broken Window Fallacy creates them.
Yes, open source software is evil; it puts IT admins out of business. On a similar note, let's ban modern farming as well; it puts hunter-gatherers out of business by making food-gathering too efficient.
"re-imaging, installing new software, authentication, virus protection, filtering, backups, security, storage, hardware failure, licence management"
None of which actually contribute to the business. With Open Source the IT dept spends much less time on the above and that translates into less IT staff, and that means less money spent on IT.
Back decades ago it was commonly believed that by the 21st century people would be working only a few hours a day to provide for themselves and having a large amount of time off.
A laughably naive view of how money works.
That didn't happen primarily because they underestimated the willingness of a willfully ignorant subset of the population to vote for class warfare against the lower and middle classes and for the wealth to accumulate at the top even at those at the bottom suffer.
No it didn't happen because money demands a return. Everything else is an emergent behaviour from this simple rule. Go read Gesell on the nature of money and how it might be overcome.
Deleted
Does open source software cost Jobs? I mean, he recently died, so my guess would be "no."
--I'm so big, my sig has its own sig.
-- See?
You know, that's exactly the argument I use with my customers. When something breaks, yes, you pay me more per hour than you'd pay someone you have onhand full time. However, I know for a fact you don't have enough work for a full-time body, therefore every hour I'm not here you pay me less than you'd pay someone you have onhand full time. Since (for these customers) there are hugely more of the latter than the former, I'm a better deal than the full-timer -- up to a certain point, when I can help you transition to a full-timer instead of using me.
And even better, if things break so hard you need two or three or more sets of hands to put things right, I can "scale up" faster and cheaper than looking for more full-timers.
When people say that open source lets people do more with less, they lose sight of the fact that it is the businesses doing the more. The fact it is with less IT/ICT -- that's business. Its no different -- and should be mourned no more -- than all those photocopiers putting typing pools surplus to requirements.
you should read everything on the internet as if it had "but I'm probably talking out of my ass" appended to it.
There was once an actual job called a computer. You were a slow human version of excel or matlab. An engineer would give you an equation or some data and the functions they wanted and you would sit there with a slide rules and solve and plot these things by hand. Well that job is gone and good riddance. Now everyone has the computwtional power of an army of these people on their phone,
I love Jesus, except for his foreign policy.
The whole 'cloud' services movement is simply a paradigm shift back to mainframe computing (although the mainframe is distributed over very large WAN's instead of LAN's). It likely won't cost jobs, simply move them around. Obscenely complicated routing infrastructure and massive data farms containing hundreds of server clusters don't design, build, maintain, and upgrade themselves... at least not yet.
If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
The fallacy is that job disappearing in a certain section means jobs evaporating altogether. There are still those needed to support end-users, IT people to implement the "buzzword of the day" solution on local machines. Sure it may mean less menial mid-level jobs are available in a specific geographical area but people have been calling to eliminate those anyway in order to save money.
So you have the really good people (the IT personnel that are qualified) still having a job, you have the cruft removed as the management and everything else is moved together with the servers to people more qualified to make such decisions and you still have your low-end (entry-level) IT personnel on the local level.
I've also noticed management tends to spend considerably more money on hosted solutions (in the vicinity of 1000% of local implementation cost) so eventually there will be a call to save money by implementing it locally so those jobs will once again be shifted in the next 5 years. There is no way that a sufficiently large organization can save money simply by shifting all it's necessary operations to another entity that wants to make profit on the same implementation. If they do there is considerable overhead, bad employees and mismanagement and the organization needs to look at all it's departments including administration, support, sales, marketing because most likely they have the same problem there but nobody has implemented cloud marketing or cloud HR yet.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
Gimp is about the same price as downloading Photoshop from the pirate bay.
If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
Perhaps your forgetting all those assholes listening to bortz that have been saying: "I want the stimulus to fail."
Obviously the a huge percentage of the conservative assholes in this country have been working for exactly that.
Because marginal cost of information is zero, competition from open source software can reduce social welfare in theory. This argument however has little to do with the argument of the Slashdot's article's British blogger, who probably should talk to some economists first. Generally creative destruction is good and efficient, but these things are a lot more complex than can be analyzed here (and not really my specialty).
"Impact of Competition from Open Source Software on Proprietary Software"
Vidyanand Choudhary and Zach Z. Zhou
http://www.citi.uconn.edu/cist07/2a.pdf
For the love of God, its a race to the bottom because of YOU people.
Many small business using open source in their products would not even exist without open source software as it would cost too much to develop the software internally.
Newsflash: All progress which improves efficiency costs jobs. How many telegraphists and blacksmiths do you know? The industrial age replaced millions of workers with machines. The computer age replaced millions of office clerks and secretaries. The internet is replacing the need for paper publishers and other physical media industries like the record companies. Easier to use software means less support and consulting personell.
There are still plenty of jobs that need to be done, so adapt or become obsolete.
If you tell Ubuntu to stop nagging it will, it'll either install everything or nothing, whichever you decide.
Windows on the other hand don't stop. If you tell it to install everything it still nags about some normal updates and updates to lawyereese and demands a reboot every time. If you tell it to just stop nagging it'll nag you that it's not allowed to nag if you disable that second nag there's yet another one. Then even if you get Windows itself to "shut up!!!" many so called anti-virus programs will start nagging and they don't stop till they're uninstalled. They you find something doesn't work because it needs one of the services you've disabled to stop the nagging ...
****!
If i have the time to grow apples and then give them for free, and show everyone how to do it. People that do this for living will go bankrupcy, Didn't you see this coming?. Congrats!
A clever way around this problem is addressed in the prescient 1976 book People's Capitalism. The basic idea is that government sponsored long-term research and development is used to boost productivity and citizens earn dividends off of their share in this National Mutual Fund. It's quite an elegant concept. I could carry on more about what I think but you can read the book for free online at peoplescapitalism.org. Social Credit and the basic income guarantee are related concepts if you are interested in learning more.
harmonious design
When an OSS project arrives on the market it creates a new value proposition in the market that either survives or fails based on user base and how well it answers a need in the market. When it does it creates a demand for those skills eg Nagios, the value proposition is utilised.
I'd love to write more but I have to got to work tomorrow and use my Open Source skills and I'm tired.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
Most jobs in the I.T world if done properly will result in loss of jobs (we automate a lot of work, once its automated less people can manage the same tasks)!!!!!
If the jobs move from smaller infrastructures due to moving their services to the cloud then wouldn't more jobs be created at the companies providing the cloud services? Someone has to support that stuff.
I work at MS in the tier 1 ops center and I tell ya, there are TONS of people working on these cloud services.
You got yourself into trouble the day you locked your key data up in a format that only a tools from a single commercial vendor can read. They've already got your data hostage; they've just not jacked up the prices to the max yet.
Sure, let's all wait for an Open Standard, it's not like business can't hold on for a year or two while it gets ratified.
So you can use the cloud badly (and you're a cheap-ass when it comes to bandwidth). Guess that means the cloud is terrible, impossible for anyone to use. Guess all those people using it successfully and efficiently are either stooges or fooling themselves, right? Or maybe, just maybe, you're over-projecting here a little.
Good job on failing basic logic and negating one existentially qualified statement with other existentially qualified statement there. No, sir, you yourself are not overprojecting at all. Let's all go to the cloud, because there are all those people (with specific needs) who are using it succesfully (for their specific needs).
Open sauce didn't cost jobs, it was cancer that killed Jobs.
At this rate programmers will be completely obsolete by 2030!
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
This is a famous letter written in 1845 to the government in response to new trade tariffs protecting candle makers:
http://bastiat.org/en/petition.html
Open source may eventually kill some jobs at places like Microsoft. But it enables other jobs, because they get free software in cases when they couldn't afford the commercial stuff.
Not that it matters much. We who make free software does it for our own sake. We will not stop making it for the sake of someone else's jobs!
I'm no luddite, but I find it hard to deny that technology in general kills jobs. Secretaries still exist, for example, but not as many (%-wise). Computers (and interns, har har) make them pretty pointless. A PC for a file cabinet, a smartphone/laptop to access that file cabinet from anywhere, voice-mail to take messages. There are many professions where a secretary was once essential - but technology has supplanted this job in most cases.
When it comes to manufacturing, a one-word explanation works: robots.
I think in the late 90s we hit the top of a bell curve. Up until that point more technology meant more jobs. But now we're the victims of our own success, and it's ridiculous to think that our old economic models will continue to be relevant. Labor is usually a business' most costly expense. A high efficiency business minimizes labor costs. In the past this was often achieved by exploiting labor in some way. Now it's being done by eliminating labor.
I'll address this before someone brings it up: I understand that car vs. horse and buggy analogy. That's not relevant to the current situation. Jobs are being replaced by machines on a broad scale across a broad range of markets: From mechanical jobs such as manufacturing to intellectual jobs such as analyzing stocks. This isn't one technology supplanting another. This is technology supplanting people.
Clinging to proprietary software to keep software jobs around is futile. It's like imposing tariffs to keep manufacturing jobs in the U.S. It may have some short-term effect but open source will eventually take over just as robots will eventually finish taking over the manufacturing sector. Not to mention, even with proprietary software, once it attains a certain level of functionality and stability the programmers are no longer necessary. You don't need a programmer to click 'copy.'
Ten years ago a lot of geeks scoffed at Bill Joy, called him a luddite or at the very least a pessimist. His manifesto was inspired by Kurzweil and The Unabomber, a couple of crazies, fer god's sake. But every year the reality of our situation becomes more clear, the future really doesn't need us.
"From the depths of my skeptical and rationalist soul, I ask the Lord to protect me from California touchie-feeliedom."
A "basic income" approach (social security and medicare for all from birth) could be better than the current needs-based approach to welfare. Then there would be no disincentive to work to get more than a basic income for those who wanted to.
I agree with you that most people want to do useful things. The problem is that often those useful things are not compensated for in the market -- stuff like raising children well, volunteering, creating great art, being an informed voter, running for office with an information campaign (as opposed to being in office), being a good friend and neighbor, comforting the dying, running a neighborhood watch program, and so on.
I'm not saying those things should be directly compensated (the quality might change), but a basic income acknowledges how much unpaid labor (often stereotypically women's work) it takes to make a healthy, happy, secure society. A basic income also acknowledges how a big percentage of our current prosperity has little to do with current labor but a lot to do with natural resources and culture (the spread of ideas) and so should be accessible by all as a human right ("freedom from want" as President Franklin Roosevelt said).
On motivation, see:
"RSA Animate - Drive: The surprising truth about what motivates us"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc
More ideas for dealing with unemployment resulting from increased efficiency in excess of rising demand on my homepage site.
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Something I put together: http://knol.google.com/k/beyond-a-jobless-recovery
"This article explores the issue of a "Jobless Recovery" mainly from a heterodox economic perspective. It emphasizes the implications of ideas by Marshall Brain and others that improvements in robotics, automation, design, and voluntary social networks are fundamentally changing the structure of the economic landscape. It outlines towards the end four major alternatives to mainstream economic practice (a basic income, a gift economy, stronger local subsistence economies, and resource-based planning). These alternatives could be used in combination to address what, even as far back as 1964, has been described as a breaking "income-through-jobs link". This link between jobs and income is breaking because of the declining value of most paid human labor relative to capital investments in automation and better design. Or, as is now the case, the value of paid human labor like at some newspapers or universities is also declining relative to the output of voluntary social networks such as for digital content production (like represented by this document). It is suggested that we will need to fundamentally reevaluate our economic theories and practices to adjust to these new realities emerging from exponential trends in technology and society."
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.