What's worse for us--outsourcing or open source?
Seriously. What's the major difference between shipping jobs overseas and eliminating them by releasing your systems to the “open source movement”? Solaris kept a lot of programmers employed at Sun. And, not that I don't want to see BIOS improve, but developing that itself and the drivers for BIOS also kept a lot of people employed.
I know there are companies based around developing for open source (such as Red Hat Linux), but I get the feeling that the mass of open source is still a volunteer effort. Creating a large pool of unemployed developers would build a pool of talent with plenty of time on its hands, but that's not a road we should be travelling.
Is it our fate to train our Indian replacements? Or to become implementers of an open technology? Where's the fun in either of those? If that's my career path, I'm going back to gene splicing (it's always cool when your fish glow green).
I'm not advocating keeping technoolgies closed source merely for the sake of employment figures. I'm just trying to figure out what movement will have a greater impact on our jobs in the coming years.
“Ironically, the good logic of transferring jobs offshore depends on it not becoming widespread. Otherwise, those collective decision makers will find that their customers are unemployed.”
- John McDaniel, comment in response to Offshore Storm: The Global Razor's Edge