[PLUG] Requium for HB 2802

[Ed Sawicki]

On Wed, 2003-05-28 at 13:20, Dylan Reinhardt wrote:

> > Why not affirmative action for technology? It's what we do when
> > society refuses to cure its ills.
> 
> It's a last resort for redressing *provable* harm that was done to a
> specific group of people.  

But that's exactly what's happening. The specific group
of people being harmed are those people who have strong
technical skills but now have difficulty finding work
because technical knowledge and technical excellence is
no longer in high demand. This is not a case, like
coal stokers on locomotives, where skills have been made
obsolete by technological improvements that benefit
society. This is a case where not only is a class of
people being put out of work but society as a whole is
suffering for it - though they don't know it.

It's already taken a toll on this country. Much of the
American IT industry work force were brought up on the
popular plug-and-play, point-and-click technologies
that insulate the underlying technical details from
not only users but support staff as well. They're not
capable of dealing with problems down at the bare metal
layers. Many American companies that need these skills in
their workers have to hire foreign nationals who still
know the stuff because their schools and Universities
can't afford the cutting-edge technologies.

I've written an essay on the subject that's based on my
experiences in the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia,
where I had an opportunity to discuss this very issue
with a Pakistani recruiter and technically-skilled Arab
men who were seeking work in the United Stats. I'll find
it and post it here. 


> It is not an appropriate way to "correct"
> market differences among various products.

Thus allowing illegal monopolies to flourish.


> After all, why stop with Linux?  Why not have affirmative action for the
> Amiga?  Why not require that a certain percentage of state records be
> stored on punch cards or cassette tape?  Don't punch card vendors
> deserve a piece of the pie too?

You're in the coal stokers area now. I'm don't think a
response is needed here.


> > You also said that Open Source will win when applications become
> > mature. You may want to reconsider this.
> 
> I'd amend this to say that Open Source vendors will win when open source
> *marketing* becomes more mature.  Really, most of us are still out there
> talking about technical excellence, failing to notice that few
> purchasing decisions hinge on technical excellence.  

I'll have to agree with you here, but this only reinforces
my argument for affirmative action.

-- 
Ed Sawicki <ed at alcpress.com>
ALC