Economic Slump hits Open Source

adamjone writes: "C|NET and Yahoo! are running a story about the hit that open source software is taking during this economic slump. Open source development is a hobby for me, not my full-time job. I find that I have more time to work on my project during times when my full-time job is slow, or we don't have enough work. Is open source truly being driven by those who make it their full-time occupation? If so, is there a happy medium for keeping bread on the table and still working within the open source community?" At least Microsoft is doing well.

Comments

Re:Is that the real cause?

[hmallett]

Sounds familiar...

MSFT sucks

[dattaway]

Yep, Microsoft is doing spectacular. Tell that to the shareholders!

Re:It's a recession, what did you expect?

[Anonymous Coward]

He just cut and pasted this troll from somewhere else though. I don't even remember where, I just remember reading it before.

Sigh... how boring!

Isn't this part of the problem.

[jvmatthe]

In the article about Microsoft doing well, MSNBC writes:

And its antitrust settlement with the Justice Department earlier this month is expected to free it to focus more fully on expanding beyond PC software.

Isn't that part of the problem? That is to say, are people so blind that they don't see that "expanding beyond PC software" mean (for Microsoft) that they will leverage their grip on the consumer PC desktop to gain advantages in new markets and shove out competitors [sic]? This line of the article says, to me, "the antitrust settlement effectively frees Microsoft to continue to violate antitrust laws".

Imagine That...

[night_flyer]

At least Microsoft is doing well.

2001-11-20 13:43:58 In typical microsoft fasion, they take over, not i (articles,news) (rejected)

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Re:cost of nothing?

[Wateshay]

I know I shouldn't respond to trolls, but what the heck -- I feel like getting modded down as offtopic today. As a regular reader of the Wall Street Journal, I'd like to point out that they have generally been open to free software, if not downright friendly. A few months ago they even had an article on the front page of their market section about Ogg Vorbis. A lot of people on slashdot look at the slashdot flame wars about capitalist versus communist and assume everyone else thinks the same way. Therefore, they assume that as staunch supporters of capitalism newspapers and magazines like WSJ, Forbes, and The Economist will automatically take a knee jerk position that open source is evil, because it might harm the established capitalist big businesses out there. The truth, though, is that those papers & magazines care about the free market, not Big Corporation X. If you advocate elimination of copyright, or legislation that requires all software to be open source regardless of economic implications, then they will probably be against you (on the other hand, all three are generally impartial news sources who will report on both sides in a fair manner). On the other hand, if open source produces a better/cheaper product that ends up bankrupting Microsoft, Oracle and the other software giants, then they will applaud it for being innovative and raising the bar. Whether or not it looks like Marxist communism is irrelevant (it doesn't, but that's an argument for a different post in a different article).