Open Source Steals More Jobs Than Offshoring

“ I wonder if more commercial programming jobs have been lost to the open source community giving away intellectual property than to cheap programming shops in India. Admittedly, I can't back that up with numbers, but I suspect it is true. Certainly, IBM has been able to lay off thousands of technical professionals since it embraced open source.“ [1]

[1] Jim Fawcette. http://www.ftponline.com/weblogger/forum.aspx?ID=1&DATE=12/10/2003

4 Comments

  • so he ws saying it as a possibility but you're saying it as a fact?



    I don't know, I am asking...



  • interesting view... there's certainly some element of truth to it..

  • As a token open source developer -- Tim O'Reilly puts it better than I do, but OSS basically moves infrastructure into the public domain (or close enough for practical purposes) so that we can focus more on providing value to customers/clients and less on reinventing wheels.



    If you presume that actual developer output is more or less constant, the more wheels you can avoid reinventing the more real value is able to be produced. Every day of effort put into reimplementing some piece of code not integral to the real business at hand is a day of effort pretty much wasted. Most of the core OSS developers on major projects are consultants or admins who find themselves needing X again, and again, and again. Most major OSS projects are infrastructure oriented (*BSD, Linux, all the Apache projects, JBoss, Gnome, KDE, etc).



    By making these into commodities it allows said consultants and admins to spend their time addressing the real problems faced by their clients and employers -- making their business work. We can take our toolbox with us, and share implementations with other people who are in similar situations and need similar tools.



    Instead of focusing on "oh no, my job writing [insert wheel here] may be outsourced to [insert outsourcing nation of choice]!" focus on "here is real value I can produce building on [insert wheel here]".



    OSS doesn't so much push jobs overseas, as changes the nature of jobs, the same way VB let developers stop writing complex UI code and start writing tools to actually help the business.



    -Brian

  • Interesting that you use the term "stealing". Let me ask you this, if people in other countries can produce code at a better value, why get worse value having it done here?



    Or, as you suggest, if people here are willing to code for free, why pay people to do it?

Comments have been disabled for this content.