Speaking of outsourcing I mean a wider sense than just hiring of manpower from abroad for some remote work. I can mark out four types here:

1.Outsourcing itself. A US or Western Europe company (let’s call it “the West”) hires an employee from Eastern Europe, Asia, etc., i. e. from a country with more poor economy (let’s call it “the East”, though it is not quite correct). This employee performs remotely some part of work for a company from West.

2.A company from West hires a company from East that performs all work content for an employer and gives ready product. In this case an employer appears for a reseller.

3.Not quite outsourcing, but it is related to outsourcing. A company from West orders a product or a service at a company from East for private use that is much cheaper than an analogous product/service by a company from West.

4.Not outsourcing at all. An employee from East moves to West and works at a company.

However we are not interested in fourth type now. The problem of outsourcing arouses a lot of discussions. On one hand – those who immediately order and perform, on other hand – specialists from West who are being ousted from labor market by specialists from East. And it is only significant disadvantage of outsourcing.

Surely, for people who lose their jobs because of foreigners this disadvantage is very significant, but nevertheless we should take into account fact that only in USA there are 340000 vacancies for programmers. Programmers from West have two ways out: improve their professionalism to level that no outsourcer could compete with them or to move to East and become outsourcers.

So what can be opposed to this disadvantage? There are quite a lot of advantages. The most obvious among them is considerable disparity between manpower costs in countries of West and in so-called Third World countries. There are a lot of reasons; it is a question for economists, but all that comes down to fact that cost of living in these countries is much lower than in USA or countries of Western Europe.

When it takes up to two years to get a web site listed, there's a serious problem. When perfectly qualified web sites are rejected for no other reason than fact editor considers them serious competition to his or her own site, there's a serious problem.

When you e-mail DMOZ about status of your web site and don't even receive a courtesy response to your questions, there's a serious problem.

When you have egotistical DMOZ editors fighting each other to have their own web sites listed, there's a serious problem.

And quite frankly, I don't see how mess DMOZ has created can be fixed. With an apparently endless backlog of web sites waiting to be approved, how can they possibly catch up. The answer is, they can't.

But this isn't just a performance issue we're talking about here, this is a morality issue. The very fact that it's a matter of public record what DMOZ is doing speaks volumes about character of many of their editors.

After all, much of what I've written negatively about DMOZ came directly from mouths and/or keyboards of DMOZ editors themselves. At least they claimed to be DMOZ editors. And for life of me, I can't imagine why anyone would want to own up to that dubious distinction, unless it were actually true.