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the coin, the U.S. economy and our supply of highly skilled and trained scientific personnel is
beneited to an enormous degree.
There has been a long-standing concern about this situation as changes in the U.S. job mar-
and engineering is perceived by many students as “hard” as compared to other disciplines
such as business. Thus, the investment in overcoming the inherent challenge of the science and
engineering disciplines does not appear worth it to the student when there appears to be more
jobs in other fields. Historically, there have been, however, sufficient rewards to attract large
numbers of “scientific immigrants” from the developing world. But what if this immigration
stops (or significantly diminishes)? There are literally millions of exceptionally intelligent and
driven young scientists who are growing up in the developing world today. The labs they
have access to in their home countries are almost universally underfunded, which creates sig-
niicant hurdles to participating in the experimental sciences. Without access to research-grade
equipment, these scientists have generally three choices: (1) switching their primary focus on
spreading information as teachers rather than creating new knowledge, (2) becoming theoreti-
beneited enormously from many of them choosing option 3; however, a flood of low-cost,
high-quality, open-source scientific hardware could accelerate a fourth choice—stay and help
pull their home countries out of poverty. The U.S. share of the world's science and engineering
graduates has been steadily declining as European and Asian universities, particularly those
from China, have increased science and engineering degrees while U.S. degree production has
to their home countries in greater numbers or begin simply staying at home, the American
dominance in science and engineering will erode further. This would result in our comparat-
ive advantage in the high-tech sector dying as well, with dire consequences for the American
economy and more importantly, for the American worker. It may be perhaps tempting to then
try to restrict open-source hardware for the continued stagnation of the status quo, but that is
a losing batle. Consider, for example, that China already has a national open-source operating
does not embrace the open-source paradigm, we run the risk of our scientific education prom-
inence and technological dominance following the death spiral of the Microsoft server mar-
ket share into the inconsequential. Instead, it seems clear that we in the United States should
aggressively capitalize on the opportunity to embrace the open-source paradigm and remain
internationally competitive. If we do not, we will be overtaken by the accelerating innovation
brought fourth by applying the open-source paradigm to scientific tools, which in turn accel-
erates all the other technologies. This last point can hardly be understated. Most working sci-
entists are familiar with the beneficial effect of using a high-quality research tool after using
antiquated equipment. It radically increases progress on individual projects. With the open-
source paradigm offering nearly universal access to an expanding array of high-grade tools,
these projects in turn lead to faster development of applied technologies.
7.3 Acceleration of Technological Evolution
With the coming widespread access to inexpensive, high-quality, open-source scientific instru-
ments, other technologies will move forward at much faster rates than to which we are accus-
tomed. Imagine how fast science and technology will evolve when a large group of collabor-
ators work together for mutual benefit. Consider even the myriad applications of the smart-
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