Office applications Toolkit

Story: It's not the Gates, it's the bars

• 
• 

pjc158, your reply shows how badly you miss the point

Open Source does provide millions of jobs around the world, look at the IT boom in India, Eastern Block countries, China, ... You may not know about the companies, most probably because they're not as prominent as Microsoft, but they're there, tens of thousands of small companies with a handfull of people, and thousands of bigger companies with more people.

Your comment that computing did not grow out of cooperation shows that you do not consider the early pioneers of computing as being important. They all had to work together, despite their different employers, to produce something usable. Without that sharing, with a proprietary non sharing model, that usability would never have come to what helped the jump from Mainframe to the future. Commodity computing? That happend way after the original cooperation that built computing which helped make commodity computing possible.

Quote: "... official figures in the UK and the USA ..." and "No wonder India and China are jumping on open source ..." You've confirmed what I wrote - that in countries where Software Patents and anti competitive, non sharing practices reign, the IT industry is suffering a reduction, and in other countries where freely sharing software is valued, IT is booming, and that's where the jobs are going to.

I have been in IT almost as long as you, and have been frustrated about how IT has constantly shot itself in the foot with closed systems, anti competitive practices, proprietary protocols, incompatible and non competitive products, and soaring costs that serve only to feed the wallets of big managers. Where the money in IT is to be made in the future is shifting away from the old user restrictive model to a new model of sharing. The money is no longer going only into the managers wallets, it's going into the developers wallets, where it belongs.

The money for the future is there, it's just that as is usual in a time of change that it's not yet clear to those holding on to an obsoleted model where everything for the future fits into place.

• 
• 

• 
• 
• 

Full Talkback thread