Tim Oren writes in Be Careful What You Wish For: Open Source and Off-Shoring:
I am bemused by folks who can simultaneously cheer the global spread of the Internet and the beneficence of the open source (OS) movement, and decry the offshoring of IT jobs. Whether they’re naive, or disingenous, or took Emerson a little too seriously, they are missing the correlation: Open source and IT offshoring are the products of the same driving forces, two faces of the same coin. And they are feeding off one another.
If IT does matter, then IT has to deal with increasing commodification. Tim adds,
If you’re competing with free, you’ve got to be – well – cheap. And that’s not available in Silicon Valley. Even if you are building on free, or adding value through services, you get to cope with customer expectations for cost set by deployment of things like the LAMP stack in enterprise environments. Guess where you get cheap?
And the debate of IT doesn’t matter rages on, as offshoring and open source keep pushing the free part of the “free, perfect, and now” that are the forces driving The Now Economy…