"the best people (no matter where they live) are hired locally, so if you aren't hiring locally, you're not hiring the best people. "
By this logic people who get paid for working on Open Source projects like the Linux Kernel or Hadoop must be bad developers? They are distributed all over the world.
Good point. The best I can say is that life is complicated and inconsistent. If you are an attractive project, you will get good developers no matter where you and they are. People will make it work. But most people outsourcing are not sexy, high profile, open source projects. If you are a boring corporate project looking to pay bottom dollar by hiring elsewhere, you're going to get what you pay for.
By this logic people who get paid for working on Open Source projects like the Linux Kernel or Hadoop must be bad developers? They are distributed all over the world.