Why do most Techies hate BREXIT? Because its a Country-Specific solution.
Britain's tech sector overwhelmingly opposed to Brexit
For me its simple, even outers cannot deny that BREXIT is a Country-Specific solution. BREXITeers want "Control" of our country.
The problem is that Country-Specific solutions just don't exist in technology development today. And before you counter, neither do bi-lateral ones either.
Techies in the UK spend their day collaborating on developments with colleagues across the connected world. They may be modifying technology from other countries for local markets or creating new solutions based on global technology and standards.
You may say that my IT department only works on our projects within the UK. Now that may be so, but I can guarantee you, that they are using globally developed operating systems, hardware, firmware, development sandboxes, compilers, Devops deployment tools, web services and databases.
Why? Simply because there is no Country-Specific UK developed solution for any of these, like there is no USA, UAE, or Uruguayan ones either. Of courses UK developers contributed to all of these globally developed tools.
The same applies for technology standards, sure there are local variants, but all based on international standards.
Techies believe that openness works, because that what we have seen drives progress.Take LAMP the technology stack that runs Internet web servers. If you want to impress the IT guys in a meeting, ask them "to spin you up a LAMP server", they will do so very quickly. LAMP is an operating system (Linux), web server (Apache), database (MySQL) and programming language (PHP) which gives you the basics to create your own website, e-commerce platform or thousands of other uses.
They are all open source, nobody owns them, anyone (with technical ability) can change them and they were developed by programmers all over the world collaborating, often for free.
They have also being phenomenally successful. Apache open-source Web-Server runs over 50% of the websites on the internet. Linux and its variants run 58% of websites. Now open source is moving into cloud-computing which means any large website will be running on servers spread across multiple countries.
Of course it wasn't always this way. Microsoft, Oracle, IBM all tried to keep these solutions as closed and proprietary and fought against open source development, from around the world, at first. All of these companies now contribute resources to open source projects.
Why did open source development win against such big technology firms? For one thing openness simply developed better solutions. Take tabbed browsing on your web browser, now standard, but first appeared in open source web browsers. They also developed free solutions. Its also important to note that open source development happened outside the control or involvement of government.
BREXITeers want to take "Control" over technology development and get government involved in all development and standards in order to ensure that they are NOT aligned with international standards, as that would mean us losing "Control".
Would they do that? This is what they are doing to businesses now, saying you will tell us the labour-force you want in advance and if we agree, we will allow you to have it, but we will always maintain "Control".
The lessons from technological development tells us that openness wins over closed every time. Sometimes open systems fail, the natural reaction is to close up, when what we need it is modified open systems.
None of this is defeatist, I am not saying the UK cannot develop technology on its own, it's just not how the world works in 2016. We could develop a UK specific database, but it would just be a monumental waste of time and would always be behind anything created globally. The UK leads in technology and this will be hampered by BREXIT, "Control" is not the answer, actually the opposite is true for technology as shown here.
If you want to see the attempt Country-Specific technology strategy then look at how North Korea is progressing. Even here they are basing developments on Chinese technology.
Cloud computing is the future and the EU has a strategy, developing a limited Country-Specific standards is completely oxymoronic. It would be like you telling the National Grid you only want to get your electricity from your own county, very loyal, but if you only took electricity generated in Essex, then you would have a lot of power cuts as demand surged across the network.
The whole idea of cloud computing is that computing services are spread out to meet demand of say a large e-commerce site like ASOS or Netflix, sometimes servers in Germany, UK and Ireland meet that demand, twenty minutes later its servers in UK, Belgium and Spain.
BREXITeers want to remove the UK from co-operation of cloud-computing and multiple other technology standards and laws with EU partners and replace them with a Country-Specific laws which we "Control". Such as the EU Directive on Data retention coming into force in 2017, the UK can regulate things such as; erasure rights, data loss incident reporting and compensation to consumers following data loss. Of course that completely reduces the UK's ability to use cloud-computing as we will only be able to use suppliers that meet the UK's new Country-Specific standards and laws, which will be basically be in the UK. It will also reduce the ability of our cloud-computing suppliers to compete in the EU, unless of course they now serve two markets instead of one, both with different rules, splitting their customer base and adding costs. To be honest cloud-computing just wasn't built with the idea of national borders in mind (neocons take a deep breath).
None of the future of technology being built today; Artificial Intelligence, Self-Driving Cars, Drones, Cloud-Computing, 3D-Shopping and Entertainment are being built by any one country with a Country-Specific strategy.
If a Country-Specific strategy cannot delivery the technology of the future, why should we believe it can deliver anything else? We know from history that the more we allow government to "Control" the more the will want to. Instead of the illusion of "Control" with BREXIT we need solutions to the problems that we have.