Economic Crisis Will Eliminate Open Source 753
An anonymous reader writes "The economic crisis will ultimately eliminate open source projects and the 'Web 2.0 free economy,' says Andrew Keen, author of The Cult of the Amateur. Along with the economic downturn and record job loss, he says, we will see the elimination of projects including Wikipedia, CNN's iReport, and much of the blogosphere. Instead of users offering their services 'for free,' he says, we're about to see a 'sharp cultural shift in our attitude toward the economic value of our labor' and a rise of online media businesses that reward their contributors with cash. Companies that will survive, he says, include Hulu, iTunes, and Mahalo. 'The hungry and cold unemployed masses aren't going to continue giving away their intellectual labor on the Internet in the speculative hope that they might get some "back end" revenue,' says Keen."
Red Hat begs to differ (Score:5, Informative)
Wait...I thought the Economic Crisis was GOOD for open source?
http://linux.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/10/21/0116221 [slashdot.org]
Re:Just like... (Score:4, Informative)
Just like.... The end of the dot-com bubble killed linux, stifled production of php sites, and made people stop sending non-commercial email. Those things all went away, right?
The latest U.S. News & World Report appears to claim this recession is deeper than the post-dot-com recession. If you want page numbers, I can dig them up when I get home.
Open Source: A Primer (Score:4, Informative)
Hi, Andrew! I know you're new to this and don't really understand these complicated ideas very well, but I'll try to help you.
My company has a program written in FoxPro. For reasons too long to explain, it's not going away any time soon. We needed a way to run queries against that data, and because FoxPro is too slow for interactive use, we decided to move that data into PostgreSQL. We looked and looked but there just wasn't a good program for regularly copying that data from one to the other on a scheduled basis. Eventually, I wrote one.
Now, my company isn't in the FoxPro-to-PostgreSQL conversion business. We have other, more interesting things to do all day than sell or support software. My boss, being enlightened, allowed me to release the program as Free Software [honeypot.net] so that other people could use it. It cost him absolutely nothing over what he'd already paid me to write the program. Since that first release, I've heard from users around the world who liked it and wanted new features or to make suggestions. Some of those features and suggestions turned out to be pretty good ideas for us, too, so I added them to the program.
My boss is happy because we really needed that program to conduct our business. I'm happy because I got to share a nice bit of code with the world. Random users everywhere are happy because they can spend their money on writing other cool programs and food and televisions instead of buying my program's commercial equivalent (if there was one). My boss got something nice, I got money to pay my mortgage, and everybody wins.
See, Andrew? It's not that hard! But please leave the big concepts to the adults until you get a little more practice, OK? Good boy.
Re:On the contrary... (Score:5, Informative)
Most large businesses are just as dumb as government organisations - you just don't get to hear about most of it.
He doesn't really harp on OSS... (Score:3, Informative)
Meanwhile, the FOSS movement can sidestep everything he's talking about for exactly the reasons that everyone here is espousing - the people who contribute to those projects are passionate about the work and tend to gain (in the long run, at least) as much from the effort as they could expect were they to sell their skills on the open market.
Re:Yeah right. (Score:5, Informative)
Wasn't it just the other day that Red Hat announced they were feeling just fine and dandy in this economic crisis, as many companies are looking to lower their expenses by going open source?
Re: I think we should be able to (Score:1, Informative)
No he is far worse... Read some of his articles and weep.
Increasing to the community tool pile... (Score:2, Informative)
..gives everyone more tools to use to go off and do *real business*, ie, "make money" if that is your goal. Because it eliminates one aspect of artificial scarcity, which then allows you to address real scarcity in real products and services and come up with something new and useful or make your existing business more efficient/whatever. This dude has no idea whatsoever about open source or shared content and how it works, the main basic raw theory. The closed off guilds and company store and town model and giant price fixing efforts through monopolies and cartels is from like centuries ago and has been proven to be a hindrance to progress and increasing wealth and prosperity. Now we still have remnants of it, and more work needs to be done there, but the trend is to share the basic stuff, then go off and work on the fine tuning for your particular niche that you use for business, either a product or service or both. I'll make it even simpler for this guy. I don't care how leet someone is coding, there's only so much a single dude can code. That is worth x. Say it is openly shared, and the dude takes back what other folks contribute and share, takes advantage of it. He now has at his disposal, x plus the combined output of a,b,c,d and etc, all the output from all the other millions of sharers so his "wealth pile" goes up way past whatever was his theoretical top limit on production. And that wealth is tools, to go on and do some real work with those tools. Look at the linux kernel for the primest of examples there.
And what people do for fun or hobbies etc., is just that, fun, and people will continue to do that no matter what, and pay for it, one way or the other, they always have. Hobbies have been around since the first cave dude figured out stringing clamshells on some rawhide and giving it to some cave chick was "productive and fun and a useful pursuit" ;)
As to "blogosphere" and discussion forums, just look how much easier it is to go find out stuff today when you have a real problem, look at the thousands of niche discussion forums where enthusiasts get together and share experiences and tip and tricks and so on. They are all much better off with being able to tap into this pool of people who are into this or that. And news is news, the scene there is a lot better than before, and people will and are "reporting" what they find out or see, then discuss (and cuss) it. Because we as humans like that stuff, it's fun and useful, else we wouldn't be doing it, so it will continue in one form or another, and the internet isn't going away. Maybe some website will go down, but others will be made, that's how that works..
As to the economy, heck ya a lot of jobs will become obsolete, whereas we have a ton of new jobs on the horizon, for example, alternate energy is booming and will continue to boom because of a simple fact. Old (and heavily centralized) energy is invest heavy in infrastructure, then continue to pay for fuel forever (plus all the speculators and monopolists and cartels profits way above cost of production into gouging land due to their fighting to maintain artificial scarcity). Alternate renewable and sustainable energy is invest heavy in infrastructure, then get free fuel forever, because there's no way anyone can cartel-ize the sun and wind and ocean waves..and there's not going to be any scarcity involved with those fuels. Which looks to be a better deal long range, and especially as things get more expensive the "old" way? And like everything else, there's a ton of computer work involved there that folks will need to be doing, then all the blue collar and now they call it "green collar" jobs that will be opening up because of it, and open source work will go to help that computer work get done, and open sharing of knowledge will help entrepreneurs figure out better ways of doing this "energy" thing. And that's just one example, it applies across the board, agriculture, manufacturing, health care, all over.
Eventually, all
Re:Odd ... (Score:3, Informative)
parallel SlashDot
...yes, the evil one.
Re: I think we should be able to (Score:3, Informative)
Um... this isn't a US downturn. This is a global recession. Please spend five minutes investigating this before you pie in the sky comment.
Re:Yeah right. (Score:5, Informative)
> Some men just want to watch the world burn.
Others just want to bring marshmallows.
Re:Yeah right. (Score:5, Informative)
I use open source code exclusively for all of of the projects I'm involved in at work. When the code doesn't do what I want it to do, I patch it and contribute the patch. In a few cases, I've contributed enough that I've been made a committer on the relevant projects.
This is how open-source software works; we're all using it out of self-interest, and contributing our changes in the interest that they be merged with the mainline codebase so that we don't have to maintain a fork. And so the mainline code gets better.
Everyone has different use cases, so everyone contributes to whatever part of the system they personally need. When those use cases overlap, the code in the intersection gets polished by all the interested parties.
Re:Yeah right. (Score:3, Informative)
Newsflash: most open source developers don't consider it solely charitable work. Many do it out of spite for what Microsoft has done to the market. Others do it because it is fun. Yet others work on open source software because their employers hired them for that purpose.
It takes all kinds of people to make the world go 'round. The open source arena is no exception.
Re: I think we should be able to (Score:3, Informative)
Um... this isn't a US downturn. This is a global recession. Please spend five minutes investigating this before you pie in the sky comment.
It's only a recession when economic growth is negative. So far, it's just a downturn.
Okay, maybe it's a US recession and a global downturn. Would that be an acceptable compromise?