Raven’s right about the worldwide impact of open source. This week I sat down with Peter Harrison of Induslogic and Leonard Liu of Augmentum, providing software product engineering services from India and China respectively. Both make extensive use of commodity stack components, though neither’s particularly religious about it. Induslogic likes free software for its price and Augmentum for the availability of the source. Both CEOs emphasized that there’s a limited window to compete on price (though Harrison acknowledge that it’s a long window, like, thirty years); instead, they’re trying to equal or exceed the quality of software produced by an equivalent team in Europe or the United States. It’s hard to imagine offshoring on this scale (each company employs nearly a thousand people) before the ubiquitous availability of source-available software infrastructure at low or no cost.

Alarmists will say that programmers are literally giving their jobs away, but I am charmed, as ever, by the virtuous circle of a gift economy, which seems to create more opportunities all round.