Thanks for the insight regarding your business/hiring experiences. Its nice to confirm some suspicions. hah. That is principally why myself (and many others included) would never actually hire someone. This is one reason why people do “contracting”. You’re not actually hiring an employee, you’re just.. .paying somebody to do work for you… .but they’re not an employee no no….

Regarding the windows debate. I challenge you to define better. Do I use openoffice? Yes. You haven’t defined stability and I feel you’re using it as a truism like everyone else seems to do. If i create a calculator program that is closed source, and always returns the expected values for adding, subtracting, multiplying and dividing, you’d call it stable. What you don’t know is the program is a backdoor and sends information about your computer usage back to the producing company, and no you didn’t know or ask for that feature. Still better? That’s windows, apple and all closed source software in general. I should say that “closed source software” isn’t SUCH a problem, rather the legal system AROUND closed source software. I think its fair that you can release compiled code without giving the source code, but you’re basically a dick if you do that (you haven’t removed their right to reverse engineer it or learn about it, thats what legal does, but you’re making it more difficult). If I have a business and run software that is closed source/microsoft or whatever, and I cannot edit the source or modify for my purposes, then it can’t possibly be better. Software’s purpose isn’t for selling and a business, its for completing the tasks desired by the users. If it fails to meet the needs of the user, for that user it isn’t good.

Regarding the operating system in general. Does corporations running servers use windows or linux? Not even a competition. So where all “money” and “wealth” is produced using computers (not individual retail consumers), Gnu/Linux is ahead of both Apple and Windows. Its literally no competition, unless we’re saying “better” is more devices to consumers who don’t even use remotely the computing power of the device.

The same argument applies to decentralization in general. Sure the US government can create a much larger much more technologically advanced, more well trained military than anything. Does that mean its “better” than a completely decentralized network of connected and unconnected militant populace cells? Better in this case could be defined a million different ways. As I see it in general this situation can be described as : Decentralized = stability of the whole, not necessarily parts, Centralized = control.

I do agree with your last point regarding certs. That’s kinda why I tempered my argument and mostly was referring to government requirements. Laws requiring certs (for anything, or for any reason).

Regarding your statements about a business, I completely disagree and I feel you’ve kinda proved my point. It seems you’ve confused morality/ethical with legality. If the only thing ethical for a business to do is make money, at all costs (thats the implication), then its ok for JP Morgan and Jamie Daimon to be what they are and do what they do. Intentionally plotting and scheming against people you’re paid to work for for profit, isn’t ethical by any stretch of the imagination. Its not market making like they claim, its bullshit. Meanwhile its completely legal. Its not ethical by any standards or measurements except if you say “profit = ethical”. Profits != ethical, it means, one thing exclusively income exceeded costs. Ethics is involved in the process of action. Since a business doesn’t magically derive income from nowhere (it must conduct an action) the question about how they act comes in, thats where ethics plays a role. We can all agree how a business conducts themselves has a lot to say with how they”succeed”.

Furthermore, there is a component of time with every “typical” argument that business’s “only purpose is to make money”. Its never discussed, but its there. What I mean is that people say… “oh it wouldn’t be an ethical move to do X, because the business will lose money eventually by customers refusing to support them”. Effectively, this said action will eventually harm the business monetarily, therefore it isn’t what it should do. So that implies, its only known, or will be known if X is ethical AFTER the fact. (you can presuppose the effects and therefore choose what is “ethical”, but you won’t know till later) This implies there is no way to know if a business has acted ethically till after the fact. This isn’t a framework for ethics, this is hindsight is 20/20. An example again with JP Morgan and Jamie Daimon. Currently the clowns at CNBC looooooove this guy, and so do the share holders of JP Morgan. Through the often illegal behavior (and legal) at this firm they’ve made alot of money and therefore are doing what they “should be doing” (their job). If all of a sudden the wind blows and they’re closed down and busted up because of these actions, the share holders will lose their money, and the morons on CNBC will say “they shouldn’t have done that, that was bad bad bad”. What was ethical, is now unethical because they were punished by it…. eventually. So through this we would conclude that either there is a time component to the ethics of behavior (there isn’t), or something was unethical and bad the whole time, it just wasn’t found out till after the fact.

One last extreme example on that. Lets talk about the US companies supporting the Nazi’s in WW2. Is that what they should have been doing? Ethical? Their job? Sure did make a lot of money. Ethical/their job for Monsanto to assist in spraying US sailors with chemical weapons? Of course not, but boy are they rich.

I should also note that one can start a business and do anything they want, for any reason. Generally whether or not they remain “in business” is if they’re not physically stopped (via force), or run out of capital. So if you chose to sell bibles for example, because you think that everyone should have bibles and you get enough return just to cover your costs, that doesn’t mean you’re not a business just because you’re not in the purpose of business to make a profit. Stating “the job of businesses is to make money, period” isn’t fact, its opinion, and/or a specific individualized defining and boxing of a concept, that doesn’t seem to match people’s expectations or reality. My opinion is this is foolhardy, isn’t an ethical ground to stand on, is why consumers do not trust businesses (they shouldn’t), and part of the reason why everyone has the “fuck the other guy” mentality. Its a symptom of completely lack of ethics/morality in individuals, society, and even at a global level.

Obviously I have to make it clear where I’m coming from since this is such a taboo subject, no I’m not communist/socialist, no I don’t want to “redistribute wealth” (steal), and no I’m not anti-profit. I am also not a person who says “corporations aren’t people” which the “left” loooooooves to do. Bullshit. A corporation as a “organization of people” is obviously not people, but all actions conducted by the corporation are from people.

This is a really good debate/discussion. Really pushed myself to think about the ins and outs of this philosophically.

Yes, contracting is the general solution, or as I used to do it contract to perm. By the time they hired me there were no questions as to whether I could do the job, they just wanted me to keep doing it. The downside is that contractors cost more. In my case twice my salary.

As for Windows, you dodged the question and only answered half. So I take it that you use Windows not Linux, so if you ask me what is better, then I ask you to tell me the reason for your choice. There is a chance that you are Linux user and have gone all open source, but you would be in the minority. I’m not using stability as a truism. Windows is a slow moving target of a standardized backwards compatible OS with a large user base using standardized drivers through known APIs. Heck I could probably pull out my floppies for old DOS games and they will work on Windows 8. Linux and similar OSs like FreeBSD are a different subject. Linux works on a subset of supported equipment. And though that subset has grown magnitudes larger, it is still only a subset. My data is old but Linux didn’t work well with solid state drives for awhile. Knowledgeable people can get Linux to work with almost anything, but not the rest of us. As much as Windows is reviled, it works. It is the foundation that companies build their products for. AutoDesk, Adobe and thousands of others picked Windows for a reason. Yes, some have some versions on Apple and some on Linux or both, but the certainty is Windows. Even Apple doesn’t have Windows long term stability, in that when they switched from the 68000 processors, they left all the old programs behind. With their new hardware they are screwing over some of their software vendors. When they came out with the iPad they reversed the way iOS mouse movement worked. Linux is a framework. Some ultralight and some heavyweights. If you write for Linux you have to know your audience. If you write for Windows you don’t. (Unless you are using bleeding edge stuff like video-cards to do math.) So yes, a vast majority of servers are Linux or other Unix derivatives, because in this space they can direct their audience. If you want to run Oracle, here is what you buy and only put our stuff on it. Heck it may be Oracle’s version of Unix.

Also if you looked at most companies you would find they run mostly Windows boxes even for servers, or at least Virtual Windows boxes on a VR framwork, but the majority of servers are Linux because a few companies have zillions of servers. Is Windows less secure? Yes. Has the government installed backdoors? Probably. Are people jerks for selling closed source software? No. It is their product, they can do with it as they wish. Do you give your services away? Open source is a different model that can work. AutoDesk sells AutoCAD for $4500 per copy and people pay because it is great software. Someday a real open-source competitor will arrive, but I haven’t seen it. I can’t edit the source and I don’t want to. Companies including mine still use Microsoft SQL for $5000 even though AnySQL is free because M$ SQL is more “stable” in the sense that it has well developed APIs that lead to well developed backup solutions and easier support. I work for a multi-billion dollar company with thousands of PCs and hundreds of servers and 99% are all Windows. Balance that against Google who makes billions per quarter and has hundreds of thousands of servers running something like Linux. Yes you are right, most of the money is made on Linux, but the truth is murkier than the numbers suggest. If you took a handful of web giants out of the numbers (Google, Amazon, Rackspace), you would find that Linux hasn’t penetrated as far as you thought.
Again I’m not saying open-source isn’t good. It is great. but it is only one of the workable models. Google says Android is open-source and it mostly is, but all their core apps like maps and gmail are closed source. Each has its place.
I wasn’t debating morality or ethics in business. Businesses aren’t people. You can’t anthropomorphize a business and apply human morality to it. The commandments don’t apply. You mentioned philosophy so I will say the answer to whether companies act morally is “mu”. From “Xen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenence”, there are three answers to a “yes” or “no” question. Yes, no and “mu”. Mu is Chinese for “nothing” or in this context, un-ask the question. Like if I asked you, did you enjoy killing your mother? You can’t answer yes or no, you can only answer “mu” as the question includes a falsehood. So if you ask if a company is moral, I would answer “mu”. Like toasters, companies are not moral or immoral. Companies are agreements joined into by people to make money. If the agreement is between a small number of people then they can decide together that they will act in some moral fashion, but the possibility of that agreement becomes impossible as the company becomes larger and nearly impossible once the company becomes publically traded. There are some companies that sell directly to consumers that have to worry about negative PR, if that negative PR will effect profits. Those are the exceptions. If the company that mines the aluminum in your beer can uses slave labor, they have little to loose from bad PR.