Perhaps it would more accurate to use the term "free market" rather than "capitalism" -- Linux *is* free market.
OK, now you are making a lot of sense. Yes, I also believe that Linux is very much "free market". In fact, I'd go so far as to say that open standards are crucial to free/competitive/ideal markets. Closed standards create artificial vendor lock, and in a monopoly ( or collusive oligopoly ) market, they give the monopoly control over prices ( which violates the definition of a free/competitive market )
Rather than being "political", Linux seems to synthesize the more favourable aspects of many political philosophies ( as opposed to the deplorable practices committed in the name of such ideologies ) which probably explains its appeal to people of all political persuaions.
But I'd still be happier if those public Linux companies would start actually making some profits out of Linux.
Yes, it's true that internet and computer stocks have been growing, but Sun's have been surging. And unlike several internet/computer companies whose stocks are driven purely by hype, Sun's are driven by earnings ( their P/E remained more or less constant up until the last year when it jumped ). Sun's financial foundation is more solid than these other companies -- their earnings as well as stock are doing extremely well, indeed better than the rest of the high tech market which is only growing modestly ( especially if you average it out, then look at earnings as opposed to stock prices ) I'm aware that Sun are not the only game in town in the server business, but they are certainly a succesful competitor at this stage.
There just isn't enough long term data to make the kind of analysis you are trying to do.
I'd agree. My point is not that I am sure that Linux isn't profitable, I am just beginning to have doubts. Redhat are 6 years old. IIRC, Microsoft already had DOS 1.0 out the door when they were 6 years old, and I take it that would mean they were in the black, and hardly "tiny" ( they didn't go public till the early 80 btw. And they weren't founded till the mid 70s )
Both Red Hat and VA Linux Systems are not profitable right now due in large part to the fact that both of them are reinvesting huge amounts of their income and capital back into themselves
Sorry, this doesn't wash. Investments/acquisitions don't count as costs for the purpose of reported earnings. Staffing is an operating cost and admittedly it does have a future benefit as does advertising, but they can only "borrow" like this for so long. ( And it's not clear that their "investments" in the development of free software are actually paying off ) However, if you buy something, that isn't counted as an operating cost for financial accounting purposes.
It might save money for you, but my point is that it doesn't make money for the companies associated with it. Microsoft could give away their operating systems and products, and that would also "make money for you", but they'd hardly be effective capitalists because of it.
Haven't you noticed that we are transitioning from a manufacturing based economy to a service based one?
Yes, this is because manufacturing is expensive. However, software development has nothing ( or almost nothing ) to do with manufacturing. The commercial software industry is about creating intellectual assets and capitalising on those assets via licensing schemes. Capitalising on ones assets is at the heart of capitalism ( duh! ) and is the most effective way to make money ( who makes more than investment bankers and stock market gurus ? ) And the software industry is booming. Take a look at MSFT's earnings chart if you have any doubts about this.
Sorry to debunk your 'Linux is socialism' fantasy,
I never said Linux was socialist. But it does embody many of the ideals of Marxism.
Each gives according to his ability and takes according to his needs
Still, I don't like to say "Linux is communist", because a lot of ignorant American's immediately assume that this means that the Linux community is Stalinist or Maoist, or that the Linux community are a bunch of dirty hippies. As a member and contributor of this community, I find both insinuations offensive.
but Linux is not at all incompatible with making money.
Can you substantiate this by naming a Linux company that has been sustaining substantial operating profits over the last two or more years ?
capitalism may be about making money, but Linux isn't. certainly there are many people who want to make money from linux, and i would like to see many of them succeed. i also want to see linux make enough money to support continuing development and improvement, which it obviously is doing.
I agree completely. I am also a fan of Linux and OpenBSD, in fact I actually contribute ( see http://pegasus.rutgers.edu/~elflord/font_howto/ and http://independence.seul.org/ )
I'm just fed up with all these naive right wing Americans who pretend that Linux is inherently capitalist ( especially since a lot of them really start to sound like Marxists when you talk to them about intellectual property )
So, yes, Microsoft can make more money during a coffee break than Linux, but only because they charge so damned much and you get so little.
Well you may feel that way, but all the dollars are voting for Microsoft. Even Linux users give Microsoft the dollar vote by purchasing Win-hardware and buying from Windows-only shops.
Sales aren't the best way of judging dominance in this new market,
Agreed. The best way to measure the performance of a company is profits, not sales. On this basis, Linux doesn't even qualify, since no Linux companies are even making a decent profit. Linux might be widely used, but that doesn't alter the fact that Linux companies are performing badly.
Don't forget, it's not like money isn't going anywhere. Money always goes somewhere. In the case of someone using NT, that money primarily goes to Microsoft, to Bill Gates and to the stockholders.
No, it doesn't go to Bill Gates and the stock holders ( when was the last time MS issued a dividend ? Hint: when your P/E is over 60, you can't afford to issue a respectable dividend. )
In the case of Linux , it's not clear that money is "freed up" ( hint: the software costs something to develop. The only question is where the resources come from. The software doesn't write itself ). The only thing that's clear is that companies that "do Linux" will have a hard time staying in business unless Linux proves itself to be a viable business propsition
If Sun's market share is being gradually eaten from the lower end up, how do you explain their rapid growth in both earnings and stock price over the last few years ? You say that their workstation sales have been dying since 1997, yet they've done well over the last few years. Your post completely ignores the fact that not only are Sun maintaining their income, their income is shooting through the roof.
In response to your claim that powerful PCs will overtake Sun's hardware -- well many UNIX servers are less powerful than today's top of the line x86 hardware. But they still sell. I don't think that the PC will ever push Sun out of the server market.
Software is what you support and contribute to (in order to make your hardware more appealing
Unfortunately, the problem with this approach is that it also makes your competitors hardware more appealing unless you go with a restrictive license.
It also suggests there's a lot of savings to be had for the economy by switching to open-source where feasible.
Or maybe it simply says that the Linux companies are all doomed to failure. It's naive to think that development of Linux doesn't cost anything. People contribute their time and time == money. Some of the developers are paid for their time, some aren't. But one thing that's for sure is that the software doesn't just materialise out of nowhere. So I'd question these supposed "savings to the economy".
As a simple solution that still benefits the readers: why not offer the plain text document on a web page, attach a copyright that allows someone else to do the markup?
Because plain text doesn't have any logical structure. It is almost impossible to convert. How do you know which text is a second level heading without some kind of directive that says so ? These kinds of directives are the kind of thing SGML takes care of. I hear of logical data rot, where daily GB's of data become unavailable due to loss of reader machines or software and a data format that is proprietory of a company gone bankrupt.
This is exactly the kind of problem SGML addresses. You stay away from proprietary formats. SGML is a W3 standard and is ASCII based. The advantage of SGML is that it allows you to put logical markup in your ASCII file. Basically, all you need to handle SGML is an SGML parser and something to map the tags in your DTD to formatting in your chosen document formats.
When I take the role of a tech. writer, I am not supposed to do document conversion.
Sure. You don't do the conversion. sgmltools does it. The whole point of SGML is that it offloads the conversion to an SGML parser.
Why the f*ck does a documentation author have to be an expert in SGML processing, format conversion and other tricks?
One hardly needs to be an expert. You only need to read a page of the HOWTO-HOWTO. HOWTOs are not write-only, you know. I was up and running with Linuxdoc immediately. It is a ridiculously simple DTD. I don't believe someone who is too lazy to learn it will put in the effort to maintain a document, because the effort is somewhere between nothing and very little. As for complaining about "lack of document authors"... where, and who ? I just submitted and they are swamped with incoming docs.
Instead of complaining,
You're the only one I see complaining.
why the f*ck don't they set up a conversion service, and accept contributions in a number of formats?
Because setting up the conversion service is very nontrivial. And because you simply can't pull logical structure out of an ASCII or Word or badly written HTML document. If you really do XML at work, you don't need to be told this.
Instead, they are proud in beeing able to generate the most useless formats out of their SGML markup graves.
PDF, Postscript, and HTML are hardly "the most useless formats".
But then please stop complaining about the lack of documentation writers!
I think you're misunderstanding my position. I am not complaining. I agree that they don't really have any right to complain either.
The fact that many good authors are just not able to handle the stuff means the loss of potential authors.
Authors that can read the HOWTO-HOWTO will not be lost.
I think LDP documents should be submitted in plain old text. Thats right simple plain old text. It seems to me LDP has it backwards. If Howto's and the like were submitted in plain old text, then everyone regardless of OS could view them.
Sure. But what happens when you want to publish them on the web, or print them ? Your suggestion that you can just manually edit them ( try it some time !!! ) is not exactly practical. Then if a particular format is preferred it could be converted by the reader.
Simply put, It's not easy to convert all those HOWTOs, especially from a text format which has no logical structure. This goes from inconvenient to a user to simply disastrous for someone who wants to publish all the documents in a book or on a webpage. It also makes updating the documents in the alternate formats a time consuming and expensive process. If this was the way they did it, you would not be able to get the LDP docs in a book or on a website ( or the website would be hideously out of date and unmaintainable ).
Is it really worth putting the users through all that much grief just to save the authors the trouble of reading one page from the HOWTO-HOWTO ? Surely, good documentation first and formost is supposed to make life easy for the readers , and if a little effort on the author's part provides substantial benefits to the readers, isn't it worthwhile ?
Secondly, I'd like to take you up on your point about "learning Linuxdoc". ( You don't need to know anything about Docbook or XML. Linuxdoc is an SGML DTD like HTML ) Linuxdoc is extremely simple, and is a lot like html. It's summed up in one small section of the HOWTO-HOWTO. I learned it more or less instantaneously ( meaning I could go straight to work without wasting time "learning" ).
I feel that the Linux Documentation Project is wonderful. But it needs some things that *all* documentation in the world needs: Pictures, Diagrams, Illustrations
In what format should the illustrations be kept in ? Bitmap formats like JPEG are a problem because they are not scalable ( they degrade when you resize ). Vector graphics formats are a problem because most web browsers don't support them. There is a problem, but solving it involves more than just drawing a few pictures.
Speaking as a coder, I actually like to draw pretty pictures (it takes a lot of time, though). Graphical visualization is indeed a great tool. However, until recently, the tools haven't been there.
Not really true. ( as you'd know if you'd done any serious LaTeX use ). The biggest problem is that finding a picture format that is TeX-friendly and web-friendly is a nontrivial task. It's really the web's fault IMO -- most browsers only display bitmap-based graphics, as opposed to scalable graphics, which means that preparing device independent illustrations that can be viewed in a web browser is not terribly easy. This is a problem, but it's a much broader and bigger problem than you think.
I'd rather drop dead than wasting my time with SGML. I have written a nice sed tutorial some time ago, which I would contribute, but not in SGML.
Fine. Then please explain to us how you are going to automatically convert your documents to postscript, tex, ascii, rtf and PDF. Then explain how you would do the same if you had 1000 or so similar documents. Seriously, read the HOWTO-howto ( if you're too lazy to do that, you're probably too lazy to maintain a HOWTO ). SGML isn't that hard ( Linuxdoc is almost exactly the same as html ).
Here are some advantages of SGML:
Emphasis on logical markup gives the HOWTOs a consistent "look and feel"
Makes it easy to generate the documents in several formats -- postscript for printing, PDF or html for online reading, rtf for word processor compatibility.
Makes long term storage more viable. For example, if you used HTML and some HTML tags became deprecated, your documents would be in an obsolete format. With Linuxdoc, you simply change your sgmltools converters to output the newer html / tex / whatever format.
In conclusion, I believe that if there's one thing the LDP got dead-right, it was the choice to use SGML.
I recently installed a nameless piece of software that had a 10 line readme file! one line said if you don't know how to do this don't! what the f*** how the hell is this meant to encourage use?
They are nopt trying to discourage use, they are simply not encouraging newbies to try compiling their stuff. I don't think that's such a bad idea. If the user can't work out how to compile ( there are plenty of docs that explain how ), they probably shouldn't.
Where can one find the "compelling evidence" ? I disagree with the argument that the labor shortage is a "hoax". Low unemployment is equivalent to a labor shortage -- it is indicative of a low supply of job seekers.
I don't necessarily disagree with arguments that ageism is a problem in the high tech industry. But I think that even if they gave every midcareer professional a job, they'd still run into similar problems with labor shortages. The problem is that they won't hire anyone over 40 even if you put a gun to their head. Blaming the immigrants is nothing but a cheap copout, and ignores the real problems.
You haven't looked for a job lately have you? If there is a labor shortage, then why do I have two degreed engineers sleeping on my couch in my house?
Let's put it this way -- those guys are a minority, and a small minority. Look at your unemployment stats. You hardly have high unemployment. I don't know how old they are, but I won't deny that ageism is rampant in the high tech industry. But that doesn't alter the fact that the US has low unemployment at the moment. BTW, I am surprised that they are having a hard time finding UNIX jobs paying more than 20K. I though most UNIX jobs paid more than that. Certainly, all the fortune 500 companies offer more than that.
As for protecting the migrant's salary -- I think the repercussions of not doing so would be more severe. You could pay immigrants about half the going rate and many of them would take it rather than stay in China, India or Mexico simply because you're still giving them more than they'll get at home. The problem with this is it creates a disincentive for employers to hire American workers. I'd say the implications for American workers are a greater cause for concern than protecting immigrants wages ( esp since they are getting paid considerably more than they would in their countries of origin )
The "tens of thousands of people waiting to get in" are from South America, mainland China, and India. Countries much poorer than the US. Not from Europe and Canada.
Take a look at your unemployment figures. The "labor shortage" is real, it's not something that the tech companies are just making up. Your claim that there are large amounts of "older, more experienced American workers" who have become "too expensive" doesn't stand up to scrutiny -- unemployment is down. People who want jobs can find them. BTW, your "cheap labor" comment is also bogus -- H1B workers need to be paid a certain minimum. And even the going rate for H1B workers in the tech industry is more than enough to support an American family, and exceeds the amount of money that American professionals in other industries are paid.
Please don't flame me, but wouldn't it be better to give them an easier path?
Yes, but perhaps Linux could become that "easier path". India has a tremendous amount of intellectual capital and not much money. Linux could be a dream come true for them. The dev tools for building end user apps are already there ( namely, GNOME/GTK and KDE/QT ), and the Indian hackers have something that they can beat into shape. Perhaps beating Linux is easier for them in the long run than paying Windows licensing fees.
Linux might not be ready for home users yet, but perhaps it can start by taking the government desktops and the server market by storm.
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OK, now you are making a lot of sense. Yes, I also believe that Linux is very much "free market". In fact, I'd go so far as to say that open standards are crucial to free/competitive/ideal markets. Closed standards create artificial vendor lock, and in a monopoly ( or collusive oligopoly ) market, they give the monopoly control over prices ( which violates the definition of a free/competitive market )
Rather than being "political", Linux seems to synthesize the more favourable aspects of many political philosophies ( as opposed to the deplorable practices committed in the name of such ideologies ) which probably explains its appeal to people of all political persuaions.
But I'd still be happier if those public Linux companies would start actually making some profits out of Linux.
Yes, it's true that internet and computer stocks have been growing, but Sun's have been surging. And unlike several internet/computer companies whose stocks are driven purely by hype, Sun's are driven by earnings ( their P/E remained more or less constant up until the last year when it jumped ). Sun's financial foundation is more solid than these other companies -- their earnings as well as stock are doing extremely well, indeed better than the rest of the high tech market which is only growing modestly ( especially if you average it out, then look at earnings as opposed to stock prices ) I'm aware that Sun are not the only game in town in the server business, but they are certainly a succesful competitor at this stage.
I'd agree. My point is not that I am sure that Linux isn't profitable, I am just beginning to have doubts. Redhat are 6 years old. IIRC, Microsoft already had DOS 1.0 out the door when they were 6 years old, and I take it that would mean they were in the black, and hardly "tiny" ( they didn't go public till the early 80 btw. And they weren't founded till the mid 70s )
Both Red Hat and VA Linux Systems are not profitable right now due in large part to the fact that both of them are reinvesting huge amounts of their income and capital back into themselves
Sorry, this doesn't wash. Investments/acquisitions don't count as costs for the purpose of reported earnings. Staffing is an operating cost and admittedly it does have a future benefit as does advertising, but they can only "borrow" like this for so long. ( And it's not clear that their "investments" in the development of free software are actually paying off ) However, if you buy something, that isn't counted as an operating cost for financial accounting purposes.
It might save money for you, but my point is that it doesn't make money for the companies associated with it. Microsoft could give away their operating systems and products, and that would also "make money for you", but they'd hardly be effective capitalists because of it.
Haven't you noticed that we are transitioning from a manufacturing based economy to a service based one?
Yes, this is because manufacturing is expensive. However, software development has nothing ( or almost nothing ) to do with manufacturing. The commercial software industry is about creating intellectual assets and capitalising on those assets via licensing schemes. Capitalising on ones assets is at the heart of capitalism ( duh! ) and is the most effective way to make money ( who makes more than investment bankers and stock market gurus ? ) And the software industry is booming. Take a look at MSFT's earnings chart if you have any doubts about this.
Sorry to debunk your 'Linux is socialism' fantasy,
I never said Linux was socialist. But it does embody many of the ideals of Marxism.
Still, I don't like to say "Linux is communist", because a lot of ignorant American's immediately assume that this means that the Linux community is Stalinist or Maoist, or that the Linux community are a bunch of dirty hippies. As a member and contributor of this community, I find both insinuations offensive.but Linux is not at all incompatible with making money.
Can you substantiate this by naming a Linux company that has been sustaining substantial operating profits over the last two or more years ?
I agree completely. I am also a fan of Linux and OpenBSD, in fact I actually contribute ( see http://pegasus.rutgers.edu/~elflord/font_howto/ and http://independence.seul.org/ )
I'm just fed up with all these naive right wing Americans who pretend that Linux is inherently capitalist ( especially since a lot of them really start to sound like Marxists when you talk to them about intellectual property )
Well you may feel that way, but all the dollars are voting for Microsoft. Even Linux users give Microsoft the dollar vote by purchasing Win-hardware and buying from Windows-only shops.
Sales aren't the best way of judging dominance in this new market,
Agreed. The best way to measure the performance of a company is profits, not sales. On this basis, Linux doesn't even qualify, since no Linux companies are even making a decent profit. Linux might be widely used, but that doesn't alter the fact that Linux companies are performing badly.
For enterprise, you need a full office suite. Applixware is the closest Linux has to a decent office suite. Koffice is also just around the corner
No, it doesn't go to Bill Gates and the stock holders ( when was the last time MS issued a dividend ? Hint: when your P/E is over 60, you can't afford to issue a respectable dividend. )
In the case of Linux , it's not clear that money is "freed up" ( hint: the software costs something to develop. The only question is where the resources come from. The software doesn't write itself ). The only thing that's clear is that companies that "do Linux" will have a hard time staying in business unless Linux proves itself to be a viable business propsition
In response to your claim that powerful PCs will overtake Sun's hardware -- well many UNIX servers are less powerful than today's top of the line x86 hardware. But they still sell. I don't think that the PC will ever push Sun out of the server market.
Unfortunately, the problem with this approach is that it also makes your competitors hardware more appealing unless you go with a restrictive license.
It also suggests there's a lot of savings to be had for the economy by switching to open-source where feasible.
Or maybe it simply says that the Linux companies are all doomed to failure. It's naive to think that development of Linux doesn't cost anything. People contribute their time and time == money. Some of the developers are paid for their time, some aren't. But one thing that's for sure is that the software doesn't just materialise out of nowhere. So I'd question these supposed "savings to the economy".
Disclaimer: the above does not constitute investment advice
Because plain text doesn't have any logical structure. It is almost impossible to convert. How do you know which text is a second level heading without some kind of directive that says so ? These kinds of directives are the kind of thing SGML takes care of. I hear of logical data rot, where daily GB's of data become unavailable due to loss of reader machines or software and a data format that is proprietory of a company gone bankrupt.
This is exactly the kind of problem SGML addresses. You stay away from proprietary formats. SGML is a W3 standard and is ASCII based. The advantage of SGML is that it allows you to put logical markup in your ASCII file. Basically, all you need to handle SGML is an SGML parser and something to map the tags in your DTD to formatting in your chosen document formats.
Sure. You don't do the conversion. sgmltools does it. The whole point of SGML is that it offloads the conversion to an SGML parser.
Why the f*ck does a documentation author have to be an expert in SGML processing, format conversion and other tricks?
One hardly needs to be an expert. You only need to read a page of the HOWTO-HOWTO. HOWTOs are not write-only, you know. I was up and running with Linuxdoc immediately. It is a ridiculously simple DTD. I don't believe someone who is too lazy to learn it will put in the effort to maintain a document, because the effort is somewhere between nothing and very little. As for complaining about "lack of document authors" ... where, and who ? I just submitted and they are swamped with incoming docs.
Instead of complaining,
You're the only one I see complaining.
why the f*ck don't they set up a conversion service, and accept contributions in a number of formats?
Because setting up the conversion service is very nontrivial. And because you simply can't pull logical structure out of an ASCII or Word or badly written HTML document. If you really do XML at work, you don't need to be told this.
Instead, they are proud in beeing able to generate the most useless formats out of their SGML markup graves.
PDF, Postscript, and HTML are hardly "the most useless formats".
But then please stop complaining about the lack of documentation writers!
I think you're misunderstanding my position. I am not complaining. I agree that they don't really have any right to complain either.
The fact that many good authors are just not able to handle the stuff means the loss of potential authors.
Authors that can read the HOWTO-HOWTO will not be lost.
Sure. But what happens when you want to publish them on the web, or print them ? Your suggestion that you can just manually edit them ( try it some time !!! ) is not exactly practical. Then if a particular format is preferred it could be converted by the reader.
Simply put, It's not easy to convert all those HOWTOs, especially from a text format which has no logical structure. This goes from inconvenient to a user to simply disastrous for someone who wants to publish all the documents in a book or on a webpage. It also makes updating the documents in the alternate formats a time consuming and expensive process. If this was the way they did it, you would not be able to get the LDP docs in a book or on a website ( or the website would be hideously out of date and unmaintainable ).
Is it really worth putting the users through all that much grief just to save the authors the trouble of reading one page from the HOWTO-HOWTO ? Surely, good documentation first and formost is supposed to make life easy for the readers , and if a little effort on the author's part provides substantial benefits to the readers, isn't it worthwhile ?
Secondly, I'd like to take you up on your point about "learning Linuxdoc". ( You don't need to know anything about Docbook or XML. Linuxdoc is an SGML DTD like HTML ) Linuxdoc is extremely simple, and is a lot like html. It's summed up in one small section of the HOWTO-HOWTO. I learned it more or less instantaneously ( meaning I could go straight to work without wasting time "learning" ).
In what format should the illustrations be kept in ? Bitmap formats like JPEG are a problem because they are not scalable ( they degrade when you resize ). Vector graphics formats are a problem because most web browsers don't support them. There is a problem, but solving it involves more than just drawing a few pictures.
Not really true. ( as you'd know if you'd done any serious LaTeX use ). The biggest problem is that finding a picture format that is TeX-friendly and web-friendly is a nontrivial task. It's really the web's fault IMO -- most browsers only display bitmap-based graphics, as opposed to scalable graphics, which means that preparing device independent illustrations that can be viewed in a web browser is not terribly easy. This is a problem, but it's a much broader and bigger problem than you think.
Fine. Then please explain to us how you are going to automatically convert your documents to postscript, tex, ascii, rtf and PDF. Then explain how you would do the same if you had 1000 or so similar documents. Seriously, read the HOWTO-howto ( if you're too lazy to do that, you're probably too lazy to maintain a HOWTO ). SGML isn't that hard ( Linuxdoc is almost exactly the same as html ).
Here are some advantages of SGML:
- Emphasis on logical markup gives the HOWTOs a consistent "look and feel"
- Makes it easy to generate the documents in several formats -- postscript for printing, PDF or html for online reading, rtf for word processor compatibility.
- Makes long term storage more viable. For example, if you used HTML and some HTML tags became deprecated, your documents would be in an obsolete format. With Linuxdoc, you simply change your sgmltools converters to output the newer html / tex / whatever format.
In conclusion, I believe that if there's one thing the LDP got dead-right, it was the choice to use SGML.They are nopt trying to discourage use, they are simply not encouraging newbies to try compiling their stuff. I don't think that's such a bad idea. If the user can't work out how to compile ( there are plenty of docs that explain how ), they probably shouldn't.
I don't necessarily disagree with arguments that ageism is a problem in the high tech industry. But I think that even if they gave every midcareer professional a job, they'd still run into similar problems with labor shortages. The problem is that they won't hire anyone over 40 even if you put a gun to their head. Blaming the immigrants is nothing but a cheap copout, and ignores the real problems.
Let's put it this way -- those guys are a minority, and a small minority. Look at your unemployment stats. You hardly have high unemployment. I don't know how old they are, but I won't deny that ageism is rampant in the high tech industry. But that doesn't alter the fact that the US has low unemployment at the moment. BTW, I am surprised that they are having a hard time finding UNIX jobs paying more than 20K. I though most UNIX jobs paid more than that. Certainly, all the fortune 500 companies offer more than that.
As for protecting the migrant's salary -- I think the repercussions of not doing so would be more severe. You could pay immigrants about half the going rate and many of them would take it rather than stay in China, India or Mexico simply because you're still giving them more than they'll get at home. The problem with this is it creates a disincentive for employers to hire American workers. I'd say the implications for American workers are a greater cause for concern than protecting immigrants wages ( esp since they are getting paid considerably more than they would in their countries of origin )
I agree. It is a real problem for some of these countries. Chicken-and-egg.
The "tens of thousands of people waiting to get in" are from South America, mainland China, and India. Countries much poorer than the US. Not from Europe and Canada.
Take a look at your unemployment figures. The "labor shortage" is real, it's not something that the tech companies are just making up. Your claim that there are large amounts of "older, more experienced American workers" who have become "too expensive" doesn't stand up to scrutiny -- unemployment is down. People who want jobs can find them. BTW, your "cheap labor" comment is also bogus -- H1B workers need to be paid a certain minimum. And even the going rate for H1B workers in the tech industry is more than enough to support an American family, and exceeds the amount of money that American professionals in other industries are paid.
Yes, but perhaps Linux could become that "easier path". India has a tremendous amount of intellectual capital and not much money. Linux could be a dream come true for them. The dev tools for building end user apps are already there ( namely, GNOME/GTK and KDE/QT ), and the Indian hackers have something that they can beat into shape. Perhaps beating Linux is easier for them in the long run than paying Windows licensing fees.
Linux might not be ready for home users yet, but perhaps it can start by taking the government desktops and the server market by storm.