Saturday - April 25, 2009

They Took Our Jobs -- The FOSS Edition

The idea that Free and Open Source Software is taking our jobs is not something I worry about.  Some folks seem to get distraught over it.

What I don't like is the "It is about the pie" argument.  I think this means that software functionality targets are fixed -- a company only wants enough software to do [X].  If they get that software for free, then they'll fire all their programmers.

This is bizarre in the extreme.  A company usually budgets a fixed amount of money and demands all the software they can get for that money.  If the core support features (network, financial, legal, etc.) are free, that frees up money to spend on other stuff.

I suppose that some companies actually do have an upper limit on functionality or features and will start to cut IT budgets once they've met their required feature set.  Generally, however, the cut to IT budgets seems to be part of across-the-board cuts in all support functions.

No one has ever said anything like "We're full up with features, and we're calling it a day, we're just going to maintain what we got -- nothing new here -- go sell your services somewhere else."

Creating Value

Open source software -- if anything -- frees up budget to do something else.  Once you've started using Python, Django and MySQL, you realize that Big Money Products (BMP™) like Oracle are best used in focused applications where the extra features are worth all that money.

All singing all dancing all one vendor isn't sensible.  It's fun, but it's expensive fun.  Decline to use Oracle for smaller applications and you find money to spend on those smaller applications.

The most important part of using any software (proprietary or open) is the "standing on the shoulders of giants" phenomena.  Our value to the organization is to create unique value that differentiates our enterprise from its competitors.

Whether we use free or expensive software doesn't matter, we have to leverage existing technology to build those unique applications that make us better.

Where Did The Jobs Go?

Let's look at the "FOSS eliminates jobs" argument.  First, it's always stated in the hypothetical.  No one ever says "my company replaced Oracle with MySQL and fired everyone."   A hypothetical argument is just dogma or ideology, not an economic force.

Sometimes, you might hear, "my company replaced Oracle with MySQL and replaced me."  Right.  You were the last Oracle DBA, or you were the first of many Oracle DBA's that had become redundant.  Either way, they took away the software that required your specific skill.  This is universally true for all technology change.  Far, far more common than FOSS, people are made redundant by a technology change among proprietary technologies.  "We switched from ASP .Net to Java and started firing C# programmers and hiring Java programmers."  FOSS has nothing to do with this.

Something you never hear is "My company switched from DB2 to MySQL and that forced IBM to fire people."  That's a possible cost of FOSS -- it might displace vendor staff.  But when your company switched from DB2 to Oracle, no one worried about IBM then.

It's Code We Didn't Write

The final analysis is that FOSS is code we didn't write.  The company is using it but the in-house developers didn't write it.  Instead the in-house developers had to install it, configure it and integrate it.  This "other" work created more value, not less.  It often seems to require the same number of people, not fewer.

As near as I can tell the FOSS Took Our Jobs is a kind of ideological slogan with real substance. 

Author: Steven Lott
Technorati Tags: Open-Source
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