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UNCTAD (United Nations Conference on Trade and Development) released a policy brief [PDF] about the impact of automation in developed and developing countries.
"The share of occupations that could experience significant automation is actually higher in developing countries than in more advanced ones, where many of these jobs have already disappeared, and this concerns about two thirds of all jobs"
[...] Much of the debate on the economic impacts of robots remains speculative, it says.
"Disruptive technologies always bring a mix of benefits and risks," the paper says, noting that by embracing the digital revolution, developing countries could use robots to open up new opportunities.
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Robots Threaten up to Two Thirds of Developing Country Jobs, but Could be an Opportunity Too
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Don't steal... the IRS hates competition!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 21 2016, @04:02AM
If you go back to Stallman's original motivation for free software, he was fed up with dealing with a printer for which the driver software was not available to users. That and similar incidents motivated his philosophy that machines and their software should serve people first, and their corporate masters second. In order to make sure that the first happened, he came up with the idea of the four freedoms, and invented the GPL and copyleft. Of course it would take a very skilled and conscientious user to diagnose and fix the problem with someone else's commercial software, but at least it would be possible.
Fast forward to today, when most of the big money in software comes in the form of Software As a Service, usually paid for by advertisers.
Do we get to study the code to see how Google, Amazon, and FB are tracking us around the Internet, and how they analyze what we're doing so they can make more effective pitches to advertisers? We do not. It's totally out of spirit of what RMS what trying to accomplish, even though all three of these companies base their operations on Linux, and all have made token contributions to open source/free software ("Summer of Code" is a typical example).
So I think "free software" is running out of gas, except that the GPL continues to be an effective license for Linux, Git, and other large projects (both commercial and non-commercial) - as long as the copyleft provisions are enforced.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 21 2016, @04:34AM
Ah yes, Summer of Code. Not only does Google benefit from free license to use Linux to make tons of money, Google also exploits each new generation of young naive coders to produce free stuff before they realize they should be getting paid for work. Google is a leech on the free software community and an exploiter of children. Google needs to die.
(Score: 0, Disagree) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 21 2016, @04:56AM
Of course it would take a very skilled and conscientious user to diagnose and fix the problem with someone else's commercial software, but at least it would be possible.
It's entirely possible to diagnose and fix problems with commercial software, without the source code. It's called reverse engineering, and skilled programmers do it every day. If Stallman were truly skilled, he wouldn't have needed to start any kind of software movement. Open source is for lame brained coders who can't hack machine language.