i am no economist. macro economics stumps me.
however,
this is debatable, but for better or worse, i am pretty sure based on my basic and incomplete understanding of the subject that
any nation adopting widespread home and commercial Free Software (GNU/Linux, *BSD, etc) use would
increase unemployment.
consider the pro-Linux
TCO arguments and
cathedral vs bazaar stuff:
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sysadmin jobs. because of the sysadmin to server ratio. i know we have some linux sysadmins here: how many servers can one linux sysadmin be expected to manage full time? and windows? instead of having 5 mediocre Microsoft Certified dudes, Company X just needs one good dude.
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software developers. consider Ubuntu. if it where proprietary, they would have had to develop the whole thing from scratch instead of building on Debian's stuff.
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tech support dudes. sure, Windows "just works"... until it randomly breaks. you
really have to know windows inside and out to keep a system running. Ubuntu LTS? Debian Stable? *BSD? not as much. less help desk technicians, less telephone tech support dudes.
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software retail. did anyone here get Ubuntu by going to a retail store and purchasing it for $19.99? no need for middle men.
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et cetera. a lot of the stuff that makes Free Software more economical does so by letting companies get more done with
fewer employees. (in addition to other money not wasted on other stuff such as needing new workstation computers every 5 years...)
clearly, there will still need to be
some folks working in all of the above fields... but will there need to be nearly as many?
widespread Free Software use in Nation X would probably create some jobs, yes.... but would it create
as many as Nation X would be losing?
from the POV of neo-colonialism and neo-imperialism, it could potentially help or be helping the United States out a great deal that 9X% of the worlds computers run Windows....
...9X% of the worlds computers do all of their basic operating system computing in a manner approved and endorsed by the United States Federal Government. i've never really thought about it like that.
i don't understand economics very well, but i wonder how much US Federal tax revenue is a direct result of that. that could be quite a chunk of change coming into the United States just because people choose to use a proprietary operating system.
is that very well maintained and clean stretch of US Highway 101 that i enjoy driving on cleaner and better maintained than it otherwise would be because somewhere around one billion Europeans are running paid-for legitimate copies of Microsoft Windows?
how much nicer would the Eurorail be, and how much nicer would that elementary school in Prague be if not for Microsoft Windows?
these are questions i am not well informed enough to answer definitively.