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Is Open Source the Answer To Giving?
Posted by
Soulskill
on Sun Apr 20, 2008 09:21 AM
from the conceptual-exports dept.
from the conceptual-exports dept.
uctpjac writes "Mark Surman, Shuttleworth Foundation fellow, writes that open source is the answer to philanthropy's $55 trillion question: how to spend the money expected to flow into foundations over the next 25 years. While others have lashed out at 'Philanthro-Capitalism' — claiming that the charitable giving of Gates and others simply extends power in the market to power over society — Surman believes that open source shows the way to the harmonious yin-yang of business and not-for-profit. Sun, Microsoft, Cisco, IBM, Yahoo, and Facebook are big backers of Creative Commons; Mozilla has spawned two for-profits. Open source shows that philanthropy and business can cohabit and mutually thrive. Indeed, philanthropy might learn from open source to find new ways to organize itself for spending that $55 trillion."
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You Can't Ever Win (Score:4, Interesting)
Open source shows that philanthropy and business can cohabit and mutually thrive ...
I'm not certain that everyone shares this view. The article seems to posit that open source is a 'perfect' donation vehicle with no down sides but I know several people who directly disagree. Why just this week, The Standish Group released a report [standishgroup.com] (that you can have for a mere 1000 USD) and this is the summary:
Boston, April 16, 2008 -- "Open Source software is raising havoc throughout the software market," said Jim Johnson, Chairman, The Standish Group (www.standishgroup.com).
"It is the ultimate in disruptive technology, and while to it is only 6% of estimated trillion dollars IT budgeted annually, it represents a real loss of $60 billion in annual revenues to software companies," said Jim Johnson, Chairman, The Standish Group International, Boston, MA.
Five years of research has gone into this new report titled "Trends in Open Source". The Open Source report discusses The Standish group's research study of the top 10 drivers that are influencing decisions on how IT is adopting open source technology.
"The Standish Group's new study clearly shows how pervasive Open Source Software is used in industry today. It is a shocking examination of Open Source usage by commercial and government organizations," said Timothy Chou, Ph.D. former President of Oracle OnDemand and author of "The End of Software: Transforming Your Business for the On Demand Future," "The Standish Group has successfully quantified both user and market behavior so that we may more fully understand what is driving this IT trend."
"The Standish Open Source Report is a thoughtful, objective and extremely useful tool for understanding the impact free software is having on the entire IT industry. Every CIO, CFO, and CEO of any corporation with large IT expenditures should read this report," said Wayne Sadin, CIO, Loomis USA, Houston, TX "The impact of Open Source on IT will be profound and The Standish Group research helps business as well as IT management make vitally important investment decisions."
The Standish Group's "Trends in Open Source" report is available free of charge to Standish Group subscribers. Non-subscribers may obtain copies directly from The Standish Group at: http://www.standishgroup.com/market_research/index.php [standishgroup.com] for $1,000 per copy.
Emphasis mine. So you can see that there is definitely a mentality of open source "costing" industries. I'm sure the people at Brittanica and other encyclopedia publishers claim millions in losses to Wikipedia.
Allow me to point out something I think the article missed which is that when you donate to open source, you're avoiding a huge loss of donations through third parties and local governments. Example, say I donate a 100 dollars every month to an African village through Africa Needs Help International (made up, it applies to almost every organization though). Well, I'll bet that ANHI takes a cut of that to run staff and transportation and such so let's say we're down to 75 USD. That 75 USD is probably used to buy from a predetermined company (usually not in Africa) and not at the best possible rate so we could probably estimate that 5 USD is trimmed off in pre-arranged agreements so we're down to 70 USD. Then whether or not that 70 USD of goods actually makes it to the village is another story. It could very well be intercepted by local guerillas, Janjaweed or the Mujahideen (often the very reasons the local villages are in need) which would actually be directly contradicting what you are trying to do.
When you donate to Open Source proj
Makes as much sense as the RIAA (Score:5, Insightful)
Love this argument. It's just like the RIAA and their "We're losing billions to piracy!" argument. In fact it's worse because nobody's even performing copyright infringment.
It's as if they take it as read that they are entitled to this money. It's usually unsupported crap.
Maybe he should also look at things like the cost to companies of switching all servers/desktops etc to expensive, non-linux platforms. The coasts of everyone developing or buying their own solution to certain problem instead of making use of quality open components.
No, OSS greases the wheels for companies. If all you're concerned about is desktop software sales then you're not thinking big enough.
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Re:You Can't Ever Win (Score:5, Insightful)
Broken windows? Broken Windows (tm)? Something like that, anyway.
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Not broken window.. (Score:3, Insightful)
$60 billion in annual revenues to software companies
They limited the scope. This may be still arguable, but by limiting the scope of discussed impact, the flow of the revenue to other companies outside that scope can be ignored getting out of having the broken window argument apply to his statement.
The report was targeted toward the software industry. I'm wagering the report in general is a warning of what software companies need to prepare for, rather than an attempt to stop it. Any attempt to even basically understand the pervasiveness of open source s
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As for the zero-sum game; look up growth. For the all-caps extraction; you might consider a chapter on opportunity cost.
Money will just corrupt open source (Score:2)
If philanthropists start donating to open source in big ways the
Re:You Can't Ever Win (Score:5, Insightful)
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Carnegie libraries (Score:2)
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I purchased an expensive HP printer for the office, and yet HP refuse to provide me with the PPD files for it. This _forces_ me to use, and support, open source drivers.
I simply cannot understand why HP refuse to the provide the ppd file for their printers. It's plain text and probably wouldn't take them more than a day to write. Yet they seem to actively refuse to do so.
$1000?! (Score:2)
Re:$1000?! (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:You Can't Ever Win (Score:5, Insightful)
It is the ultimate in disruptive technology, and while to it is only 6% of estimated trillion dollars IT budgeted annually, it represents a real savings of $60 billion annually for businesses and consumers.
So clearly thier claim of "objective" is total BS.
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"It is the ultimate in disruptive technology, and while to it is only 6% of estimated trillion dollars IT budgeted annually, it represents a real loss of $60 billion in annual revenues to software companies,"
The MP/RIAA says the same but just as many movies and songs are being created, probably even more because of technology. Just like disruptive technologies [wikipedia.org] do Open Source only reduces how much the incumbents, in this case software businesses, may make. Many others can profit while they and others ga
One thing was missing (Score:5, Insightful)
Transparency was notably absent from his discussion of capitalism, open source, and philanthropy. I don't see how you can have a discussion about philanthropy, much less "open source" without talking about transparency.
TAXES, TAXEs TAXES (Score:2, Interesting)
The obvious reason is that they lack political clout.
Perhaps the Shuttle
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I have (one year) written off hours spent developing Open Source as "independent business losses" to avoid sending Uncle Sam a check for $1000 that my tax software told me I owed. The real value of my Open Source time contribution is obviously quite undefined, but I certainly could have spent the time (200-300 hours) that I estimate that I spent doing something for a much more profitable project - so I think it was justified.
Really, what would be great would be if Shuttleworth could create a "Non-for-pro
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I thought the "free" in "free software" was supposed to be about speech and not beer.
Bullshit (Score:5, Insightful)
It's the socialeconomic structure that's broken, mostly because it *requires* penniless and poor and impoverished people in order to work. Philanthropy is not gonna fix anything, it will just maintain the current status quo.
and yes, who gives a flying circus ass about giving money to free software projects, when there's people all over the planet starving and living with less than a dollar a day?
i mean, look who the heck is proposing this "Open Software philanthropy". Someone who is on a stipend from a damn-rich institution. This is not about helping FREE SOFTWARE (yes, i'm yelling on purpose). It's about making more money.
Louis Althusser, anyone?
Re:Bullshit (Score:5, Interesting)
Unfortunately, there are some significant cultural barriers which can make this difficult. School, often seen as a prerequisite for many important skills, is never going to be as cool as sports (basketball) and hanging around with friends wasting time, so you need someone around who can really push children and youth to achieve - and many don't have that.
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De-skilled labour, I really wish the whole unskilled labour thing and the social status conferred upon the 'unskilled' myth would die.
The truth of the matter is this: We've changed the environment in which people exist radically and their biology was designed for a world radically different then modern society with all its technology.
The fact that technology and 'de-skillization' is on a collision course with white collar
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Where I work, a large proportion of workers are "unskilled". Some are pretty highly skilled "unskilled" workers. You could certainly not take them out and drop in replacements who didn't know what they were doing and stay in business.
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It's the socialeconomic structure that's broken, mostly because it *requires* penniless and poor and impoverished people in order to work.
Society's real middle-long-term problem is to get those unskilled laborers a few Skills so they can do something useful and won't be completely obsoleted by a robot some day that's more cost-effective.
I have to interject and rephrase your statement of the "problem" as being biased and closed-minded. --- "Society's real middle-long-term opportunity is to get develop automated systems that have the useful skills to free society's intellectual vanguard to ponder bigger-better problems instead of mundane, repetitive shit." (Show of hands - how many have re-implemented a 5 to 25 year old designs for "modern" tech?).
Meanwhile, with costs driven down by automated systems producing everything from food to
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Actually, it is true. It isn't the requirement of skilled or unskilled labor that is the cause, it's the system of using fractional reserve lending to provide money supply. It means that the available dollars being released is always less that the debt produced, since the dollars are produced as debt at interest. Therefore, somebody will be unable to pay thei
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You would rather we completely ignore the lower income 50% of the world (who would benefit from free software), because 1% of the world have bigger problems?
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The idea of philanthropism (soup kitchens, clothes depots and your semi-mandatory sermon after the act) historically came about to aliviate the destitute who were flocking into the industrializing towns of the 18th and 19th century.
There's a word for what you just did...
Ethnocentrism [wikipedia.org]
Have you ever head of bread and circuses [wikipedia.org]?
I'm sure the Ancient Egyptian, Ancient Chinese and Sumerian kingdoms had the equivalent of soup kitchens.
It's the socialeconomic structure that's broken, mostly because it *requires* penniless and poor and impoverished people in order to work. Philanthropy is not gonna fix anything, it will just maintain the current status quo.
Blaming the structure does nothing to change the fact that there is a certain number of penniless and homeless people.
If you remember anything from highschool economics, you'd know there is always going to be a group of unemployed people who are not searching for jobs and are homeless. It's the nature of the
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No it does not. Your mistake is called the Zero Sum Fallacy. There is a Wikipedia article [wikipedia.org] but it isn't good enough to precisely dispel your mistake. This fallacy was basically debunked ~230 years ago by Adam Smith in the book that founded the subject of economics; The Wealth of Nations [wikipedia.org]. In one of the first chapters Smith uses his own method of manufacturing; "The Di
A modest proposal (Score:2)
Since most killing in the world is done by small arms, Why not use the money to bomb all the small arms and amunition factories? Without the supply of AKs and ammo for them, rag-tag guerillas and oppressive governments the world over will be forced to pay a higher freight for such weapons. They'll think twice about giving a 10 year old the weapon when it costs $50,000. With cheap war more costly to wage, it will become less frequent, freeing up the supply lines and alleviating the hunger provlem. Govern
What I would like to see (Score:5, Insightful)
id engine give aways are marketing, not charity (Score:2)
When id gives away an old game engine that is marketing, not charity. They are as much in the business of licensing game engines as they are in the business of game sales. Getting future programmers to cut their teeth on an id engine is branding and familiarization, it makes their current licensable engine a little more valuable.
I'm not saying there is
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Almost every company involved with open source does it for selfish reasons, but the FOSS community still benefits.
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That is the wrong question. You should be asking how many dudes working with old engines today will be customers tomorrow? More or fewer than if the old engines were not released?
id Software is going down by the way in the engine department. Nobody with self respect would touch the Doom 3 Engine and the only notable game that did it was Prey
Obsolete hardware (Score:2)
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It could, and this used to be the thing to do before about 2004 or so. But if you are needing something of modest performance there is almost always something that uses next to no electricity to do it... and weighs a fraction as well (hence less total resource use). It's probably better to retire the hardware to a scrap metal dealer than cause more coal burning at the other end of your wall outlet.
Landfills are already being mined. As our r
Has to encompass both software and hardware (Score:2)
There are many many things you can do with cheap donated hardware and free software that will help a charitable organization reduce costs and thereby increase the percentage of their funds which make it into the hands of those they intend to help... this is a good thing. BUT when it comes to teaching those people how to
triple bottom line business (Score:2)
Where I really see a large portion of that money going is to "triple bottom line" ventures, for profit companies that consider their social and environmental bottom line equally with their financial bottom line. The peopl
Couple of essays on this kind of approach (Score:3, Informative)
http://www.guptaoption.com/2.long_peace.php [guptaoption.com] - Winning the Long Peace
http://www.guptaoption.com/5.open_source_development.php [guptaoption.com] - Saving the World through Open Source
(also relevant: http://appropedia.org/ [appropedia.org]
Basically, if governments or foundations pay for open source innovation in key areas, like solar cookers and efficient cooking stoves, rural water purification technologies - hell, basic sanitation - they can get a very great deal of leverage on the fundamental problems of the world for only a tiny fraction of the money it would take to try and solve them directly.
It's like Linux or Apache - even counting corporate funding, not that much money went into these things, but the value created in the developing world is *huge*. Can you imagine trying to run the IT infrastructure of the developing world, where techs are rare and expensive, on Windows?
Well, we could do the same for infrastructure in general.
More at http://hexayurt.com/ [hexayurt.com] - click on the infrastructure links.
There is a problem. (Score:2)
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Wait a minute... (Score:4, Funny)
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What do I win?
Re:Right.. (Score:5, Funny)
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Third World (Score:2)
We're still working on the food
The only reason the Third World is short of food is because of the West or Developed Nations. The Third World has to capability to grow enough of their own food, with plenty left for export. However 2 beliefs and policies of the west has harmed this. First is the belief that most people should live in cities. This belief led to policies to encourage rural people to move to cities while large farms grow food. However people who grew up on small farms and knew how to far
www.waterforpeople.org (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.waterforpeople.org/ [waterforpeople.org]
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