[rick888]

"It causes unemployment (at least short term) in the country outsourcing its work"

This isn't a problem with outsourcing. It's a problem with technology. Technology has now made it so everyone must compete on a global level. An small mom and pop shop now competes with Amazon and every other website in the world that sells similar merchandise.

If you control it in the US, business owners will just incorporate elsewhere to remain competitive. The US should provide tax incentives to business owners that keep jobs in the US.

"There is obviously something wrong, and the poor are being exploited."

Rather than blaming companies, which are actually providing people with a living, blame governments. In many of those countries (especially China), bribing government officials is the only way you can do business.

"But these stories are really more about greed and exploitation, which we should definitely stand against by asking for more regulations, monitoring and rules for outsourcing"

It's interesting because outsourcing has many parallels with software piracy. Many people don't want to pay the price for some software (businesses don't want to pay American wages) so they download it for free instead (businesses go to a foreign country and pay peanuts). We see what happens when you try to control these sorts of situations.

More regulation and control isn't the answer. It needs to make sense business-wise to keep jobs in the US rather than outsourcing. Some jobs are already gone forever. But it doesn't mean there won't be something else to take its place. It will just require different types of education.

This is only the beginning.

Open source will eventually either put developers out of a job, or massively decrease salaries. Why would a business owner pay for a software engineer when they can pay for a software mechanic (someone with much less experience and at a lower pay-scale)? Open source developers are giving out the difficult parts for free, most business owners only need to make additions.

Right now, we are in a transition. Many business owners don't realize this. In 5-10 years, this won't be the case.