From: "James A. Donald" <jamesd@echeque.com>
Date: Sat, 17 Aug 1996 07:41:09 +0800
To: Arun Mehta <cypherpunks@toad.com>
Subject: re: National Socio-Economic Security Need for Encryption     Technology
Message-ID: <199608162021.NAA18831@dns1.noc.best.net>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


At 10:49 PM 8/14/96 +0600, Arun Mehta wrote:
> I was trying to explain how incomes and prices happened to be
> lower in India, 

That was not an explanation, that was mystic word salad.  

It would be an explanation if wealth mysteriously rained
from the sky, rather than was produced by men.

James A Donald wrote:
> > The fact is a company like Informix has a campus in India, and
> > it has campuses in the US that are largely staffed by Indian teams,
> > and it will pay big bucks to get its people out of India, even
> > though it has to pay them more than ten times as much in the US.

Arun Mehta wrote:
> I imagine (not knowing why Informix does what it does) that the
> reason might have something to do with:
>
> 1) Bringing the programmer closer to the customer, to understand
> the problem better, or to commission the software, debug it under
> working conditions, whatever

In fact what gets sent to the Indian campus is largely legacy
work, which is in large part precisely the work that requires 
the closest contact with the customer, contact with actual 
working conditions, and the like.

This seems to be a general practice, not just an Informix practice, for
in an article on "India's silicon valley" I read that the work done in
India was largely done on existing legacy apps, often in obsolete
languages and operating systems.

This is of course the work that places the least amount of the
companies intellectual assets in India, and thus the work that
gives the Indian government the least power over Informix and its
activities.  Informix could abandon the Indian campus and all
the intellectual assets on which it was working, and all the
physical assets located there, at any moment and not suffer any 
serious loss or inconvenience.

It is overwhelmingly clear that the question is simply who has the 
power?  Those who wish to hire peoples services in order to produce
wealth, or those who can command peoples services because they have
guns?

That is what makes most people in some places poor and most people 
in some places affluent.

> Could you please be more precise? In what way does the "power of
> the Indian government" intrude? You use the term "proven" rather
> loosely... there could be other explanations for the company
> wanting to move its employees around.

Presumably the same kind of reasons as caused foreign companies
to flee India the first time around.
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