Hey Sean, I believe you totally missed what i was trying to saying. My fault. I must have missed saying it properly. I guess it was just too late at night to write clearly enough. In any case, i certainly seem to have passed your signature test!
I was working with someone in Sweden. We were running workshops for businesses. She was approached by the welfare department there. They were looking for ways to get people out looking for work again, and asked for her help. She gave me the 30% figure. I thought it was very high myself, but took her at her word. She told me many people aren't counted in the unemployment figures. When they don't look for work, they don't count them. They are considered "disabled". Or they live in an area where there just isn't work. Nearly everyone i knew there struggles to pay their taxes. Nearly everyone i came in contact with there was out of work for extended periods of time at various points in their life. Programmers were being laid off by Ericsson, SAS, Saab, what's the big phone company ... Telia. I knew the guy there that ran Telia's programming department ... he and his whole team were laid off. Everybody. Overnight. They outsourced overseas. He told me that many programmers can't hang on to their jobs, and when they can't find work, they stay home and work on open source. He found this very normal. If they can't get work, what are they supposed to do? Same thing happened to the programming team we were going to work with at SAS. Our contract got cancelled because everybody got laid off. 400 some people. Outsourced. It was too expensive for the company to keep them. One programmer in particular i was friends with told me many programmers just stay home. They work on open source stuff. Why go out and try to get a job if i'm just going to get laid off again in a few months. Lemme do something worthwhile with my time. Makes total sense to me. Swedes have a different attitude toward life. They know they'll be taken care of, no matter what. I find that attitude wonderful. I loved working there. But that comfort comes at a high price. High taxes, high prices, high costs to businesses, higher risk of losing your job or going bankrupt. Savy people in business for themselves put 70% of their gross income aside to make sure they have their tax bill covered. But sorry, that wasn't at all my point. What i was trying to say is that the price of the attitude that "It should be free, it should be provided" can be very high. When Joe Reinhart feels obligated to provide whatever training he can for free about Model-Glue, instead of creating a comprehensive training for it available online and charging for it, because of the "It's better if i provide it free" ideal that permeates the air we breathe in this shared space out here ... then it might be making it making it more expensive for everyone to learn Model-Glue. It is! What he could explain in 5 minutes, 100's of people need to work out for themselves in as many hours. The socialist ideal can work out to be very expensive. That's all i'm saying. Same goes for Hal Helms. He's been in conflict for a long time about what he can provide for free and where he has to draw the line and charge for his training. And a lot of people have given him and Ben Edwards a hard time about creating the Mach-II framework " just so they could sell their training". They think it should be for free, provided. And we have the Mach-II site. Which is as much as he could provide for free, and that freeness has made it very expensive (in time and energy) for most people to learn Mach-II. If we as a group would be very grateful to pay $69 or $89 for an online training course to learn Mach-II, maybe he'd gladly make one. He'll certainly sell 100's of them. It'll make it a LOT less expensive for us as a group to learn Mach-II, because so many of us would catch on so much faster under Hal's tutalage. (And he'd probably get many more people to his on-site courses) And the simple fact that many more people would have the opportunity to learn it would draw MORE people in. But to do that, he'd need to buck a taboo. He'd need to risk being disliked. Which sucks. Because it prevents us all from learning efficiently. And at this point, we all really, really need efficient ways to learn, or we're all going to drowned in all the stuff coming our way. It also sucks because the underlying belief that free is free is simply and totally wrong. In our case, in the ColdFusion framework world, effectively, free training works out to be very inefficient, incomplete training. Ray Camden is universally liked for all the stuff he provides for free. And i think it's wonderful what he manages to put out. If he suddenly decided to charge $29.99 for a souped up version of his BlogCFC, i think a lot of us would be a little shocked. What if he suddenly decided to impose an upgrade price of $19.95 for BlogCFC - Man, he'd be taking a big risk with his status in the community if put a $19.95 price tag on his BlogCFC upgrades. I don't think he'd do it. For the same reason, i don't think anyone would dare to take the risk and the time to create an comprehensive online training course for their framework and charge for it. Which is an absolute shame. It would be SO far out if every framework had a complete online training course with it, and we were given the choice to pay for the training course or hack our way through it on our own, for "free." The level of training and competence that we all shared collectively would take a sudden, very substantial leap. And continue growing. Have i been understood? I'm challenging our commonly held belief here that free should be highly valued. I'm trying to turn that on it's head and state that if someone charges anything south of $100 to provide an online training for their framework, they'd be doing the community a tremendous service. A much greater service than Ray is providing for free, because training is the most valuable thing you can offer to us in this space. And Sean, the reason i feel it's approriate to this list is because people come here for training. Most all the frameworks we've got share one common thing ... a strong reliance on CFC's. When we collectively don't have adaquate training via other means, many of us spend many hours hanging out on these lists. Which are again "free", but a very ineffecient "market" for training. 100's of trainers hang out with 100's of students repeatly typing out and reading and misunderstanding and reclarifying the same lessons again and again. In some cases, the socialist ideal can work out to be very expensive. I think we might have a case of that here. That's all i'm saying. nando >-----Original Message----- >From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] >Behalf Of Sean Corfield >Sent: Saturday, January 14, 2006 1:50 PM >To: [email protected] >Subject: Re: [CFCDev] State of Coldfusion UI Development > > >On 1/13/06, Nando <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >> 8-10% - That's of those seeking employment. Uncounted are those >who aren't >> seeking employment. It's something i was told, and the number includes >> people who have decided to remain unemployed and just live off >of welfare. > >Perhaps you should substantiate your wild (and somewhat offensive) claims? > >Several of my good friends are Scandinavian software developers. They >came over to live (and work) in the US for several years but then went >back to Scandinavia (to live *and* work!) to raise their kids. They >are employed by large software comporations (like Ericsson) and they >are, for the most part, also heavy contributors to open source >projects. > >Some code they write on company time, some on their own time. Most >every open source developer that I know (and I've known many over the >25 years I've been developing software) is gainfully employed and >often their company sanctions release of code as open source - or >directly sponsors it. > >I've been writing open source on and off for about 20 years and, like >most all of the other developers I've interacted with on those >projects, I've always been gainfully employed while writing open >source software. > >If you want to continue to rant about unemployed Scandinavians and >their virtuous welfare system, please do it on your blog and not on >this technical mailing list. >-- >Sean A Corfield -- http://corfield.org/ >Got frameworks? > >"If you're not annoying somebody, you're not really alive." >-- Margaret Atwood > > >---------------------------------------------------------- >You are subscribed to cfcdev. To unsubscribe, send an email to >[email protected] with the words 'unsubscribe cfcdev' as the >subject of the email. > >CFCDev is run by CFCZone (www.cfczone.org) and supported by >CFXHosting (www.cfxhosting.com). > >An archive of the CFCDev list is available at www.mail-archive.com/[email protected] ---------------------------------------------------------- You are subscribed to cfcdev. To unsubscribe, send an email to [email protected] with the words 'unsubscribe cfcdev' as the subject of the email. CFCDev is run by CFCZone (www.cfczone.org) and supported by CFXHosting (www.cfxhosting.com). An archive of the CFCDev list is available at www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]
