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Is Open Source Recession Proof?
DaMan writes "ZDNet asks Is open source recession proof?
'So, how might a recession affect open source software? Well, first off, I think that any business model that relies on volunteers could certainly see interest decline if times get tough. There are a lot of businesses that rely on people working for them for free because they get a pay check somewhere else, and I think that a recession would make people question working without getting any dollars in return.'"
1) Employees of major corporations assigned to opensource could be laid off or reassigned to directly profitable projects.
2) People who work on opensource in their spare time could be laid off and
a) Be unable to buy computers, maintain an internet connection, etc.
b) OR... have lots of spare time and do a lot of cool stuff to build their resume.
3) Folks who are depressed are not every productive. In a deep recession there will be a lot of fear, anxiety, and depression.
4) Donations to opensource bandwidth, download sites, and so on could falter and lead to blackouts of key opensource resources.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
For open source to succeed, it needs money to host the project (or at least be placed on a "free public" server), and time from volunteers.
A recession may impact the first portion, but as long as there are programmers for the second portion that have free time, development will continue.
There are a lot of businesses that rely on people working for them for free because they get a pay check somewhere else, and I think that a recession would make people question working without getting any dollars in return.'
On the flip side of that, if you have a lot of unemployed coders who want to keep their skill-set up-to-date (as well as avoid a large gap in their work history), open source provides a way to do both.
If you can do anything besides just counting beans, and you stay out of debt, you are recession proof.
What?
What's the point of the original message? "You get less job opportunities from developing for OSS when there's little need for developers".
Ok. And if you're working on CSS? What's more likely, that some OSS goes "out of business" or your proprietary company? Like someone else has already posted, what is more likely to be used in times of little money, software to buy or software to take?
Not to mention that, well, when you have more spare time (because you're lacking a job), wouldn't it be a quite GOOD idea to develop some nifty piece of software, push it into OSS and find companies interested in using it AND hiring the guy who knows it best?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Developers who find themselves unemployed might suddenly be _more_ willing to work on OSS projects. It's a way to keep one's skills sharp and to stay involved in the profession. Obviously job hunting is a #1 priority for someone who's unemployed, but volunteering for a project is also a good idea for lots of reasons.
I know if I lost my job, I would seriously considered joining a project. Right now my priorities are 1) family, 2) job, 3) everything else.
[Sir Garlon] is the marvellest knight that is now living, for he destroyeth many good knights, for he goeth invisible.
Umm... yes?
Because, unlike closed source solutions, when the company that was bankrolling the development of your favorite programs, someone else can still pick it up and run with it.
Because, unlike closed source solutions, you aren't reliant on solely one entity to provide assitance.
Because, unlike closed source solutions, even if no one is developing the software actively beyond bug patches, it's still avaliable.
Totally agree. Plus hard core coders who NEED to have an interesting app to work on might end up working on OSS in their free time because they were forced to take a boring job in a shitty market.
I think the main difference between the Bubble and today's impending recession is that back then the tech industry fell down and the "holdouts", namely brick and mortar stores, physical goods and services, etc were propped up because they could point to the .coms and say "We were never that audacious, we have business plans and 20+ years of experience blah blah blah."
Freelancing at that time was pretty clear because there still was a genuine need for getting wired and with the times and with the bust those still standing didn't want to invest heavily on an in-house version of what failed in the wild.
This US recession, at least, is being lead by the plummetting dollar and conversely skyrocketing oil prices along with just about every other commodity. Sub-prime fallout isn't helping and even with an impending intrest rate cut from the fed it's still not going to right itself anytime soon. This particular pain hurts every industry equally and IMHO there will be less money to go around altogether. With a shrinking pie, OSS might get a bigger slice of it but overall I don't see it getting better in the immediate future as far as funding.
More Twoson than Cupertino
Recessions aren't supposed to happen based on Keynesian theory since all the worlds' governments and their central banks have been creating credit in a rate almost never seen before on the global scale. Print money, create jobs, right? Of course, the reality is that the central banks have been creating credit for one specific reason: to transfer wealth from the poor and middle class to the bank-connected elites.
There is no recession -- it's just part of the cycle of credit expansion/contraction that occurs to regularly shift our future wealth to those who have been taking advantage of that credit creation since the 70s, if not earlier. Look at it this way: all that lovely money that was created via credit expansion, and then spent, still exists. If you took a $200,000 HELOC on your home that is now worth $100,000, you likely spent that $200,000 somewhere (Hummer, cruises, clothes, electronic gadgets, new porch, etc). The money didn't just cancel out the debt that was created -- it was spent, and it lined someone's pockets.
The wealthy have been hoarding money for decades. Stick it in the mattress, in the vault, anywhere but in a savings account or in the market where the money would stay in the economies, keeping them at least operating. Now, credit is tight, because those who have it don't want to risk letting the middle class earn it to invest it in their own wealth-growth schemes.
Open Source is likely the sector MOST hurt by a credit crunch. Those without a connection to the IP-monopolized software sector will have a tough time borrowing to develop new software, pay for payrolls, or expand their marketing budgets. They money exists, but it's not easily loaned out until the credit crunch creates a new legion of people who are desperate for a little more debt accessibility. The OSS community may not operate on debt, but I'd doubt it. Most people I know, including small business owners, wouldn't have a meal in their fridge if it wasn't for easy credit.
My business, which generally stays away from OSS, operates on a positive cashflow, paying dividends to its owners, who also operate on a positive cashflow. The software sectors that will stay afloat during a credit crunch are those who are cash positive, and are in no rush to spend it until there are deals to be had.
I can't wait for a big recession, or even a depression. I sat on the sidelines on home ownership for 3 years, and finally bought again this year (after selling 3 years ago at near peak) for 1X my annual income. Easy as pie. In terms of business, I know many little IT companies and marketing companies that are on the verge of falling apart. They have assets, and client books, that are worth significant prices, but since no one is spending right now, their value is dropping. Thankfully, those of us who saved instead of spent, and contracted instead of expanded during a bubble, will have cash that is worth MUCH more than it was worth 2 or 3 years ago.
So it isn't specific sectors that will get hurt or gain ground -- nearly everyone who existed with a negative cashflow or a debt-maintained business plan will get hurt. Their values will drop, and those who held cash or fully-owned assets (land, commercial property, gold, etc) will be ready to swoop in and pick up valuable assets at a deep discount.
Back in the dotcom/dotbomb days, I also stayed on the sidelines. All of my competitors were spinning "Y2K!!!" marketing garbage to clients, who spent lots of money on a non-issue. We, instead, told people it was a non-issue. We didn't go public, try to create useless software, or expand more than 10-15% per year in size. When the SHTF, there were MANY assets we picked up for pennies on the dollar when things exploded.
So if you're an OSS or a closed-source developer, and you're hurting, remember for the next time another bubble grows: stay out of it. Hold cash, pay off your debts faster than you think you should, and be ready for the mass price cuts on things you wanted to buy when you origi
Recession equals increase in unemployed programmers...
:P
Increase in unemployed programmers lead to an increase in free time available to programmers to work on open-source projects.
Thus recessions are a boon for open-source software. The bane of open source software is a good economy.
People do not always react logically. There is a good chance there will be a recession and a lot of people will lose jobs and look at ways to cut costs. The question is is whether they will see FOSS as a valid choice in that. As it is, I suspect the vast majority of people will not. The thing is, in the more general population, FOSS/Linux/Whatever just plain has 0 visibility. It won't grow because people don't even understand it/recognize it as an option. This is changing. As Dell offers it on their Walmart PCs and businesses adopt Linux desktops, people will become aware of it as an option. The real question is whether or not FOSS will become visible enough to the public eye and mind in time. Why 'in time'? I do believe that a lot of things, from volunteers times to bandwidth to development hours put in will be reduced by a recession. The less people have the less they have to give. It's nice to think that programmers who lose jobs will sit at home and code on FOSS projects all day but more likely is that they'll spend time looking for jobs, doing household tasks they'd otherwise hire people to do, and even accept other work part-time until they can find a 'real' job. Donations will slack off as purchasing power drops. That is the race that must be won. Between getting the FOSS into the public sector with enough visibility to have it widely adopted before those who support it cease, at least in part, in order to focus on more immediate personal issues. It could go either way, I believe. This could lead to explosive, radiating growth, or a die-off.
I don't think OSS contributors are driven by money (the vast majority I would say are not) so I don't see that their having financial troubles would affect whether they're willing to contribute to an OSS project or not. Indeed, I think that if some of them got laid off, in between looking for a new gig (and possibly as a resume enhancing exercise) they might contribute some of that newly-spare time to working on their pet project(s). After all, if you're sitting home trolling for a job, once you've done your daily search/apply/despair thing, don't you have another seven hours to spend "working" on something you care about?
In fact, one reason OSS software is "recession proof" is because it's (mostly) done for love rather than money. If OSS projects relied on the state of the economy, that would be one thing, but a lot of OSS projects are things that people are working on because they want to, rather than have to to put food on the table.
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What do you consider a freeloader? Someone that uses OSS but doesn't write code for it? How is it freeloading when you're doing exactly what the software was intended to be used for?
People make actual, real money by running FOSS software. They don't have to write code to use the software. Lots of companies use apache, Linux, etc and pay their staff to maintain it. These people will contribute by posting on message boards, asking and answering questions, and moving FOSS into the foreground more and more.
You just don't understand. It's a different way of doing things, and if you can't get that, you're missing the whole point of it entirely.
- It's not the Macs I hate. It's Digg users. -
Recession isn't when there isn't enough money, recession is when the money is hoarded and no longer used for exchange, leading those who are the owners of the real capital to foreclose on everyone and scoop up ownership of anything that isn't already theirs, and causing hardship because everyone just stops working.
The problem with a recession is that everyone just sits around doing nothing with no direction, not that the money supply dried up. It's a testament to the power of sheeple.
So, if people have nothing to do that will make them a quick buck one way or the other, and they haven't yet lost their tools of the trade, there's every reason to think they might contribute more just because they are idle.
Of course, when they've taken your house, it's kind of hard to write software while you're living in a tent city...
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
Do we really need to apply those non-issue quantifiers to open source, over and over again?
that means more work done here.
Sure, once you spend billions of [your currency here] rebuilding the factories and infrastructure we've since let turn to rust. It's like what we're discovering now with our train capacity, if you have thousands of people that all want to go from point A to point B at the same time, the most efficient way is by train, alas we've gone and ripped up all the tracks not being used by cargo. It's gone, and nothing is going to make it come back.
And that's assuming they could FIND a boring job in a shitty market. Until that happens, they have plenty of time to work on open source.
Granted, job hunting is a time-consuming enterprise, but it only takes a few hours a day to scan the new opportunities. Meanwhile, people want to continue making accomplishments worthy of a resume. People can contribute to open source and get positive publicity for doing it, at a time when they have nothing else to do.
Actually, the US dollar is plummeting because of a very costly military expense. To pay for it, the US Treasury Department has been pumping out tons and tons of US dollars. In most cases, this causes devalulation immediately, but as the US dollar is a reserve currency, it held value purely because everyone wants to hold US dollars.
Oil prices skyrocket because of huge demand (China), and uncertainty in the supply market (rattling sabres in the middle east and in South America makes people nervous, which makes the oil production unsteady). THe devaluing US dollar also encourages it to rise, and oil-producing countries (which pay in their own currency) require more US dollars to pay for the oil extraction.
But this has been going on for years. What really brings it on is the change in the credit laws and the subprime mortgage crisis, as that leads to shortages of cash for borrowers. Companies can't borrow to expand operations and they lose potential profits, and the subprime mortgages causing foreclosures and a sudden glut of homes on the market (impacting construction and related industries, and the trickle-down effect).
Huge chain of events, but it looks like the subprime mortgages may be what broke the camel's back.
he doesn't know much about the OSS culture. He sees the business end, but does he know the "gift culture" OSS lives in? Yeah, developers do it for the bullet points on their CV, but also because they can. They develop because they can. Some of us see OSS as the utopia where free information exchange is happening and commerce is less important. I agree that smaller project might see volunteers dry up as they spend their time job seeking. I do not agree that hardware vendors will see a recession and stop Linux driver development. Do they make their money from drivers? Or do they need to support the growing numbers of Linux users in their customer base? Do developers of Linux drivers make OSS drivers? (*caugh* *ATI* *caugh*) Do those developers get paid or are they volunteer? Are all OSS developers volunteer? See - he doesn't seem to know that money can be made from open source. Just because I publish my code doesn't mean my customers can use it on their own. Otherwise, they might not have contracted me.
Power to the Penguin!
Actually, Curriculum Vitae is still fairly widely used.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curriculum_vitae#Terminology
Lots of places use it interchangeably, although there is supposed to be a difference in style between the two. I'd definitely use CV when applying to anything remotely academic, and might tend towards using Resume when applying to a business.
ash
If they put an open source license on the stuff you are working on, then you can take it with you, even if your employer never distributed it.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
I agree with everything you said, but would also like to add a few others.
Consumer credit ab/use is out of hand. People are spending themselves to insolvency, and then the first speed bump they hit (lost job, new roof, unplanned medical expenses) drives them under.
I'm not ascribing blame to corporations completely, but in the end every business sells a product. In order to increase the amount of money they make, they need to sell more product and/or cut operating expenses. That means, in part, cutting jobs and benefits while going out of their way to sell more product to people who can not, across the board, afford to buy more product.
Less-than-intelligent banks and people took advantage of too-good-to-be-true loans to do/afford stuff that they otherwise couldn't.
My personal bank account is at an old and large bank, still held in majority by its founding family. My business account is at a local credit union because they don't screw me on fees nearly as badly.
When I went to the credit union on Friday, I noticed banner ads suggesting people take out a second mortgage to go on vacation and take a 100-month car loan so they can drive a luxury car on an ecobox car budget.
The bank isn't forcing people to do it, but those are both such bad ideas that I can't even begin to clear the bile from my throat.
People just finance everything these days. First off, they don't realize how much extra they're paying in interest and second, it just allows them to eat up every dollar in their paychecks before they even get them.
My wife and I splurged a bit around the holidays and bought a relatively large flat panel TV. Across most of the stores we went to while shopping around, we had a hard time figuring out what the "buy it now" price was for the hardware. In most cases, the pricetag would say something like $129/mo in huge print and then $1699 in small print somewhere. Needless to say, we weren't interested in financing a TV.
I'm not saying credit or financing is inherently evil. Immediate needs (shelter, transportation, medical etc.) are ripe for financing. If you can pay cash, all the better. People confuse needs and wants. We didn't buy the big TV until just now because we didn't have the hard currency to do it. No way were we going to buy an unnecessary TV on a credit card.
We, especially the children of the platinum card spend-all 1980's need to take a minute (or a class) in personal finance and household economics. Where our parents might not have even had credit cards in their 20's and 30's, we grew up in their midst, moreso without the feel and smell of Bejamin Franklin in our back pocket on Friday. Plastic spends easier than cash.
Credit is a tool, but a dangerous one. We need to use it wisely.
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(IANAL) If the license on the code that they paid you to modify requires that changes be licensed under the same license, then they own the copyrights but they'd have a hard time arguing that you don't have a license to it. (So far as the changes are a derived work of the code they don't own; separate stuff that you did along with the open source project doesn't count.) Just make sure that the copyright notices credit the company (not yourself) and that the license is GPL-like rather than BSD-like. (If they pay you to work on a BSD/X/MIT-licensed piece of OSS for internal use, they may well be preparing a proprietary version, which is perfectly fine by the license, and you don't get to pass it on.)
Note that the important detail here is that the company is under license obligations in order to prepare derived works of the code they don't own and use those modified versions.
It may be a factor if you have to take a significant pay cut due to the recession. This can happen if you lose your job because the company folds or decides to lay off lots of people to cut their costs, and you have to take whatever job you can to pay the bills.
If it's bad enough, you may well find yourself having to work longer hours possibly in multiple jobs, and therefore not have enough spare time or energy to spend developing software.
Worst case, your computer explodes and you can't justify the cash to fix/buy a new one if you're barely making ends meet as it is.
Again, you with your "pay me" mentality. If you put your work out there as FOSS, then it's out there. You're letting people use it for whatever they want. Who cares if they want feature x or y? You don't have to listen to them. You could even say "If you want feature Z, pay me $50." There's no rules in FOSS against that. In fact, that's what some people do.
"If the developer doesn't need a feater you want just why should he spend his time putting it in?"
Nope. He or she can do whatever they want. They don't have to do anything. Generally, FOSS begins as an interesting project for some programmer(s) and might or might not turn into something that other people want to be a part in, or are willing to pay you to continue.
Big projects don't set up public bug tracking systems so they can get pissed when someone wants a feature added. Generally speaking, these suggestions are exactly what they're looking for. But THEY choose to do it, or not to do it. Nobody's on the hook.
"I guess he might if that has value for him but it isn't an obligation."
Exactly! I'm not sure how that is a disagreement with what I've been saying.
"So if you don't contribute and you don't like it then don't use it."
Again, PAY ME OR GO AWAY. No! If you insist on being paid, don't write FOSS. There will always be a huge majority of users of FOSS that don't contribute. They don't have to; you are giving away the software and source code. But, some will. And again, who cares about random users on the internet?
Grow some balls and get over it. Geez, man up already.
- It's not the Macs I hate. It's Digg users. -
Bah. You go halfway in looking up the numbers, and then jump to (wrong) conclusions. Your oil stats, for example, are *double* reality (20 million is 1/4 of 80 million, not half!). Then look at the GDP breakdown by nation and note that the US is producing more than 1/4 of the world's economic output - that's right, the US is *overall* quite efficient. The cars do suck though :(
"There's only about 300,000,000 americans, their excessive consumption can be compensated by minor growth in other counties."
Go look up the total value of all US imports. Then go look up the world GDP again. Then go look up economic growth rates. You'll end up with the entire rest of the world needing to average over 15% growth to make up for the loss. Note that that's the extreme opposite of what happens during global recessions. And it sure as hell isn't "minor growth". The world growth rate is more like 5% in a good year.
Perhaps you should also go look up China's net import/export stats. Their overall trade surplus is half the size of the trade imbalance with the US. Compare that difference to their GDP, and then compare that fraction to their growth rate. Notice they're about the same? Creepy, isn't it?
As for US money in China, if China has $1 trillion and China's GDP is $2.5 trillion, what happens if to China if they DO devalue the dollar? Not good things. If they push the dollar's inflation up to something nasty like 15%, then they've just wasted $150 billion, and that's if it only lasts for a year and absolutely nothing else changes (in a world where the financial areas flip out over mere rumors of the dollar's inflation going up a fraction of one percent?)