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.'"

Comments

Depends on your definition

[PenguinBoyDave]

If you are talking about the development and evangelization of Open Source, then I would say yes. People are going to volunteer regardless. However, when you are talking about companies that sell or service Open Source software, then I would say no...it is not recession-proof. Economics are economics, and money is the same everywhere. Where there is a crunch, money doesn't flow as freely, and both Open Source and proprietary models will suffer.

Now...had they have said "Is FREE software recession-proof" then I would say, "yes...it is."

Just the opposite

[Bruce Perens]

What was the best thing that happened for Open Source on Wall Street? 9/11.

Of course nobody wanted it that way. But when some Wall Street firms lost data centers and desktops, Sun, IBM, and HP couldn't make hardware fast enough. So, beige boxes all over the east ended up in ad-hoc data centers, running Linux or BSD. And surprise, they ran as well, often better than their predecessors.

Open Source is going to do well whenever IT can't pay a lot for software and has to stretch its budget. Good times might be worse for Open Source, but I don't see them being terrible for it.

Bruce

Re:Then you are doomed to fail.

[SatanicPuppy]

Don't discount people who just deploy OSS for a living. I know a guy who probably hasn't contributed 10 lines of code over his career, but who is so effective at taking poorly documented OSS projects and making them function beautifully in commercial deployments...He makes a good living, evangelizes the hell out of OSS (he's a true believer), and drives money back into the projects.

Most critically of all, he has the ability to see the flaws, and to visualize the next step that would make the project into something awesome. People like that, who know the features that really need to exist in the project, are almost more important than the people who end up actually coding the feature in. I can do the code, but the spark of genius behind a really good feature...That's special.

Re:They just don't get it.

[yerM)M]

Agreed. In fact from my own professional history, if you have a job and convince your employers that open source is a good idea, when they fire you you can take your work with you. Open source is great job security from the perspective of keeping your toolset alive from position to position.

Recession. Where?

[Peer]

Sure it is... maybe this is a nice moment to remind everyone that the world is bigger than just the USA. There's other countries that will trive in spite of any recession in the USA.

There are loads of projects that are being run outside of the USA (Ubuntu etc.)

Open Source Work for Hire?

[Dareth]

If an employer pays you to work on an open source project, but they never distribute that project since it is for in-house use, can you legally take your work with you when you go? Experience, sure they can't keep that, but the actual code, changes and fixes, would belong to the employer?

Re:Ways a recession could affect Opensource

[drmerope]

Employees of major corporations assigned to opensource could be laid off or reassigned to directly profitable projects.

Bingo. This is precisely what happened to the FreeBSD probject when the dotcom bubble burst. Half of their developers got laid off in the middle of major architectural work (fine-grained locking). It took years for them to recover. Conversely, Linux in 2000 was much more of a hobbyist world (unlike now) and kept going without a hitch.

Re:They just don't get it.

[Coryoth]

Actually, the US dollar is plummeting because of a very costly military expense...Oil prices skyrocket because of huge demand (China)...But this has been going on for years. Indeed, it's been on a slow but steady boil for a long time: I wrote about these problems back in 2004. What I find more worrying than the problems themselves, however, is how blithely they've been ignored for the last 5 years or more. It really didn't take a genius to see these were potential issues that were only getting steadily worse (if I could see it, surely anyone could). It required little or no insight to see that, while they weren't presenting an immediate problem, if nothing was done they would simply simmer away under the surface getting worse and worse and waiting for some catalyst to really bring them to the fore. Despite the obviousnes of this, however, US politicians and US media seem to have been happy to largely ignore them. Indeed, even with the arrival of an appropriate catalyst there seems to be little or no interest in the deeper underlying issues that, as you say, have been going for years.