With a very large number of IT personnel in the US wearing-out shoe leather looking
for employment, my guess is that some number of volunteers could be assembled.
Do the professionally training unemployed think that open source would create future employment for them?
One of the great transformations in the United States over the last half of the 20th Century has been the decline of organized employment unions, often called labor unions, because it was laborers who first mobilized themselves against perceived injustices in the economic system.
In my experience, technical professionals, who have been the elite of the 'white collar' employment, have disdained not only the labor unions but the entire concept that benefit is to be gained from a shared vision of economic justice. No, the meritocracy is their vision of economic justice.
To be sure, there have been and continue to be exceptions. I believe
that nearly every technical and professional person on this list is an
exception. In the computer industry there is the Computer
Professionals for Social Responsibility, an organization with a gross
income of less than $200,000, which has addressed open source. There is also the Electronic Freedom Foundation.
Neither of these organizations identify open source as a top level project of theirs, although open source is central in many of their issues.
-- Wayne Wilson An attachment containing my pgp-signature is included. My public key fingerprint is: 9325 05AD 866B BCCB 45BF E86A 63E1 C6ED 4130 5461 My public key can be downloaded from wwwkeys.us.pgp.net
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