Ubuntu mentioned on Slashdot article

[Jan Claeys]

Op do, 15-06-2006 te 10:21 -0400, schreef Shawn McMahon:
> On Thu, Jun 15, 2006 at 03:46:20PM +0200, Jan Claeys said:
> > If American businesses outsource all their labour-intensive jobs this
> > wouldn't create a lot of new jobs in America...   ;-)
> 
> This is a fallacy of division.  You cannot logically reason that
> "if everyone did this, it would be bad; therefore it is bad if anyone
> does this".
> 
> If everyone spent 8 hours every day writing GPLed source code, we'd all
> starve to death; should everyone therefore stop writing GPLed source
> code?

I put that ";-)" in there for a reason as it was an over-generalisation.

But there is some truth in it too: if a too large part of the economy
moves to another place on Earth, that will cause serious problems in
those places it's moving from.  That means export for the new
manufacturers to the old import nations goes down, and of course that
will cause their profit to go down too (as most of them have no serious
domestic market).

A better way to raise the _general_ income in a less-developed area is
to grow the local economy at a rate similar to the export economy, and
that's often forgotten...

And about "if everyone did this": how can I survive as a company without
outsourcing if most other companies offering the same product do
outsource their production?

This sort of (economic) issues is really not as easy as it looks like.

Outsourcing is neither bad nor good...


-- 
Jan Claeys