No amount of legistlation is going to stop the market. If you start legislating outsourcing out of existance, the U.S. will become less competitive and Indian companies will start supplying software and services directly. What's happening is a market correction. Like all market corrections, its painful, destructive, and leaves a lot of unemployed people in its wake. Its also rather inevitable. What is mainly going to happen is the Indian standard of living increasing over the years while the U.S. decreases until they have some parity. At which point business will move to the next cheap labour country (China?) Welcome to Free Trade. You westerners invented it. RTFM.
while your issues with this are reasonable, its a bit shortsighted.
1) even if the user does not want to *see* the source code, an informed user will realise that switching to an open source model will likely improve the quality of the application (because OS is a better development model). so there's an incentive to free the code.
2 & 3) while these points seem rational, they fall flat when compared to voting. you can say the same thing about elections. your vote being one out of millions, your one vote is no gaurantee your candidate will win. and if enough people vote for your candidate, your vote is irrelevant. however, people still vote. and their votes do make a difference. not each on its own, but as an aggregate.
you dont have to pay the full ransom. just contributing a few dollars will ensure that the code is released sooner rather than later. with enough people paying up, the code will get released. if not enough people pay, there isn't enough market for it. in a sense, you're voting with your cash for which applications you want in the market. the difference from closed source is that you dont have to *keep paying* to keep them in the market.
While improving the code on a client's website, I became suspicious of the credit card validation code. The setup was that a user would get sent offsite to the credit card validation service. They would enter their credit card details and the validation service would process the card, bill the user, and then send an activation code to my client's website. Recieving the activation code was confirmation that the credit card was legit and the user was a paying customer. The problem was that the authorization code was always the same. In fact, according to the validation service's spec, the code was always '0000'. And all the codes were sent via the web pages the user accessed as HTML hidden variables. One could (and I did) build dummy HTML pages that simply sent the authorization code to the website, bypassing the validation service, and recieving all the goodies reserved for paying customers. So I went to see the validation service people to explain to them their non-existant securtity model. And they acknowledged the problem and said they would have it fixed promptly. And if you believe that, boy have I got a bridge you'ld love to have! First they claimed that since the code was a 'hidden variable' no one could see it. After I built the dummy page in front of them (in friggin notepad), they claimed that I didnt get all the authentication codes in and they were sending 'secret, invisible' authorization codes that didn't appear on the web pages. Nevermind the fact if I, as the website programmer, couldn't access those 'secret, invisible' authorization codes I couldn't well check for them to autheticate users could I? Then, they claimed that only people like me could do it, and that I was a Hacker (captial H, please). And, don't you know, Hackers arent allowed to access the validation service. It was really bad. I ended up yelling at their chief programmer and calling him a liar to his face before they finally stopped stonewalling.
what really shakes up people about current technology is how radically they change things.
i mean of course all technology must be regulated. They all are to some extent. Think of cars, guns, airplanes. Entire traffic laws are written to regulate cars. A lot of the criminal code states what you can and can't do with guns. There are all sorts regulations about who can fly what, where and when.
so any new technology will be (and for the sake of sanity ought to be) regulated in some fashion.
but that's diffrent from wanting the new technology to be stopped in its tracks until some 'issues' have been resolved. and i think the reason people react that way is becuase new technologies have come too close to radically altering some of our fundemental notions about life. and i think i lot of pro-technology people (as can be found on this site) don't realise or respect that fact. technology is freaking a lot of people out. they've been forced to consider questions that are very challenging.
i mean, deal with these questions:
Cloning
if a lab clones a human from another, who gets guardianship of the baby? the lab? the genetic doner?
if a lab creates a human by splicing dna from diffrent people, who then gets guardianship? the lab? one of the doners? all the doners?
does a clone legally have a parent? is a clone legally an orphane? is a clone the citizen of the country he/she was created in? does a clone aquire the citzenship of the person he/she was cloned from?
Information
can you buy and sell information?
can you own information?
can you rent information?
is information a 'thing'?
can you own how you use information?
is transmitting information equivalent to using information?
you may have ready answers for these questions, but realise a lot of people don't. and they need time to consider the possibilities. so you can be sure a lot of them will freak out and yell 'stop!' so they have time to mull things over.
now its bad when people don't have the courage to look into the situation to come out with answers. but its also bad when people think we don't need to think about the situation and lets plough right on ahead.
the idea isn't that 'people shouldnt be worrying their pretty little heads about that. let the market sort it out'. it should be is 'everyone should worry their pretty little heads about that, so they can deal with it when it comes. and make the right descions.'
so bloody hell don't shut up people who are trying to get people to worry their heads about it.
Slashdot Mirror
No amount of legistlation is going to stop the market. If you start legislating outsourcing out of existance, the U.S. will become less competitive and Indian companies will start supplying software and services directly.
What's happening is a market correction. Like all market corrections, its painful, destructive, and leaves a lot of unemployed people in its wake. Its also rather inevitable.
What is mainly going to happen is the Indian standard of living increasing over the years while the U.S. decreases until they have some parity. At which point business will move to the next cheap labour country (China?)
Welcome to Free Trade. You westerners invented it. RTFM.
while your issues with this are reasonable, its a bit shortsighted.
1) even if the user does not want to *see* the source code, an informed user will realise that switching to an open source model will likely improve the quality of the application (because OS is a better development model). so there's an incentive to free the code.
2 & 3) while these points seem rational, they fall flat when compared to voting. you can say the same thing about elections. your vote being one out of millions, your one vote is no gaurantee your candidate will win. and if enough people vote for your candidate, your vote is irrelevant. however, people still vote. and their votes do make a difference. not each on its own, but as an aggregate.
you dont have to pay the full ransom. just contributing a few dollars will ensure that the code is released sooner rather than later. with enough people paying up, the code will get released. if not enough people pay, there isn't enough market for it. in a sense, you're voting with your cash for which applications you want in the market. the difference from closed source is that you dont have to *keep paying* to keep them in the market.
While improving the code on a client's website, I became suspicious of the credit card validation code. The setup was that a user would get sent offsite to the credit card validation service. They would enter their credit card details and the validation service would process the card, bill the user, and then send an activation code to my client's website. Recieving the activation code was confirmation that the credit card was legit and the user was a paying customer.
The problem was that the authorization code was always the same. In fact, according to the validation service's spec, the code was always '0000'. And all the codes were sent via the web pages the user accessed as HTML hidden variables. One could (and I did) build dummy HTML pages that simply sent the authorization code to the website, bypassing the validation service, and recieving all the goodies reserved for paying customers.
So I went to see the validation service people to explain to them their non-existant securtity model. And they acknowledged the problem and said they would have it fixed promptly. And if you believe that, boy have I got a bridge you'ld love to have!
First they claimed that since the code was a 'hidden variable' no one could see it.
After I built the dummy page in front of them (in friggin notepad), they claimed that I didnt get all the authentication codes in and they were sending 'secret, invisible' authorization codes that didn't appear on the web pages. Nevermind the fact if I, as the website programmer, couldn't access those 'secret, invisible' authorization codes I couldn't well check for them to autheticate users could I?
Then, they claimed that only people like me could do it, and that I was a Hacker (captial H, please). And, don't you know, Hackers arent allowed to access the validation service.
It was really bad. I ended up yelling at their chief programmer and calling him a liar to his face before they finally stopped stonewalling.
what really shakes up people about current technology is how radically they change things.
i mean of course all technology must be regulated. They all are to some extent. Think of cars, guns, airplanes. Entire traffic laws are written to regulate cars. A lot of the criminal code states what you can and can't do with guns. There are all sorts regulations about who can fly what, where and when.
so any new technology will be (and for the sake of sanity ought to be) regulated in some fashion.
but that's diffrent from wanting the new technology to be stopped in its tracks until some 'issues' have been resolved. and i think the reason people react that way is becuase new technologies have come too close to radically altering some of our fundemental notions about life. and i think i lot of pro-technology people (as can be found on this site) don't realise or respect that fact. technology is freaking a lot of people out. they've been forced to consider questions that are very challenging.
i mean, deal with these questions:
Cloning
if a lab clones a human from another, who gets guardianship of the baby? the lab? the genetic doner?
if a lab creates a human by splicing dna from diffrent people, who then gets guardianship? the lab? one of the doners? all the doners?
does a clone legally have a parent? is a clone legally an orphane? is a clone the citizen of the country he/she was created in? does a clone aquire the citzenship of the person he/she was cloned from?
Information
can you buy and sell information?
can you own information?
can you rent information?
is information a 'thing'?
can you own how you use information?
is transmitting information equivalent to using information?
you may have ready answers for these questions, but realise a lot of people don't. and they need time to consider the possibilities. so you can be sure a lot of them will freak out and yell 'stop!' so they have time to mull things over.
now its bad when people don't have the courage to look into the situation to come out with answers. but its also bad when people think we don't need to think about the situation and lets plough right on ahead.
the idea isn't that 'people shouldnt be worrying their pretty little heads about that. let the market sort it out'. it should be is 'everyone should worry their pretty little heads about that, so they can deal with it when it comes. and make the right descions.'
so bloody hell don't shut up people who are trying to get people to worry their heads about it.