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Is Open Source the Answer To Giving?
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."
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 (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 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
My work here is dung.
And if the third world needs good software anytime soon I'm sure this'll be the way to do it.
Until then, where's the Open Source Food & Clean Water Initiative?
...Amnesty International and all of those other humanitarian organizations have absolutely no need of money. Better to give it to the Apache Foundation than to feed one of those nasty poor people in Africa or some dirty place like that.
Transparency.
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.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
Despite all the claims of selfless humility. the prime motivator for "bigtime commercial philanthropy" is the tax man. Today, millions of dollars worth of valuble software products have been donated to educational, charitable and other institutions - with no incumbent financial reward. I know these products have real value, because of their extensive use, so why isn't their a mechanism for offering a similar tax reward to the authors.
The obvious reason is that they lack political clout.
Perhaps the Shuttleworth Foundation should devote some energy in this direction. Many of us have developed plans for distributing tax savings to open source authors who make valuble products freely available. If any of these plans could succeed, there could be an explosion of software development.
The answer is to send it all to me.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
The problem with philanthropy is that a fundamental motivation and goal for all donors (or their administrators) is to create legacy. Philanthropy seems to be the mean of trying to "buy life beyond life", some form of immortality.
Monetary wealth is often created in questionable ways - and there is no guarantee that being wealthy means that you have real abilities to make valid decision, how your donation helps best "mankind".
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.
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?
----
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. Governments that try to make up for this by fabricating their own weapons and/or developing large weapons as countermeasures will be forced to develope high technology as the US and other Western powers have. In order to do that, they'll have to educate their people. Another problem solved.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Maybe FOSS or OLTP can make some indirect contribution, but I think the people who are trying to survive would rather have food, drinking water, medicine, and basic supplies.
Even if companies made a policy of open sourcing their abandonware and old products like ID games does with their old game engines it would help a lot. Hell, even open sourcing the hardware specs on their obsolete products would be a boon - old hardware could enjoy an extended life with open source drivers, as poor people likely couldn't afford their shiny new "Vista ready" peripherals anyway. At least it keeps it out of landfills.
My rights don't need management.
""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,""
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.
Even if companies made a policy of open sourcing their abandonware and old products like ID games does with their old game engines it would help a lot.
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 anything wrong with id's give aways, just lets not delude anyone into thinking it is a selfless act.
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.
...
If philanthropists start donating to open source in big ways the exact same thing will happen to open source. Many charities started as the donations of small amounts of money and time by individuals, just like open source. Once big money arrived so did the con men. Also, once big money arrives ad hoc networks will be replaced by more traditional organization and overhead will develop there as well. Organizations make accountability and monitoring easier, market will be necessary to make sure you get your share of donations, more lawyers, more accountants, programmers begin to look at open source as a career rather than a hobby and therefore needing a salary and benefits (the organization has money, why work for free?),
If open source wants to contribute to the well-being of the world, poor nations specifically and charitable organizations in general it needs to encompass both the software and the hardware.
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 care for themselves and how to create their own solutions, it requires both software and hardware.
Open sourcing hardware specs and putting hardware patents into the public domain or under an open source license would dramatically decrease the costs associated with creating their own industry.
Imagine if Intel or AMD were to open source some of their older generation of CPUs, motherboards, etc and allow companies in Africa or Eastern Europe to begin developing their own local hardware platforms. There would still be a market for their more current generation of computers but for general use in business and at home the local devices could prove a huge benefit... not to mention the job creation just in manufacturing the hardware itself. I'm not just talking about PCs either.... I'm talking about embedded devices of all types.
We may even find that these companies will eventually develop new alternative technologies themselves and become major players in the markets at which point Intel or AMD can buy them out or license this new tech that they would not otherwise have access to (as they can't possibly think of everything on their own).
Essentially this is a charitable way to fund startups in 3rd world nations which can provide an end goal for those who choose to educate themselves and want to get out of a subsistence life. One of the hardest challenges 3rd world nations face is that they have no place to employ their citizens who do go into higher education... so those people end up leaving and going to nations where there are opportunities.
A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
You could just give me $1.5 M.
That would enable me to not work forever. I'm sure I'd contribute more to the society if I didn't need to spend 8 h from Monday-Friday in a most inefficient manner.
Ever hear of a Carnegie library? 3,500 of them, look around.
Philanthropy is great - organizations worldwide are short on funds and would be able to do so much more with additional funding. I don't think we should underestimate the needs in non-technology areas, remembering that almost a third of the world's population lives in "extreme poverty" (\\
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 people who are actually on the ground, implementing these projects that philanthropists fund, realize that the most difficult part of any project is making it sustainable after the sponsoring organization leaves. So I think many are launching these social ventures to "invest" the beneficiaries in the projects, as well as create a sustainable source of wealth for the local community. There are a lot of amazing ideas in this space that are just waiting for funding, and I think that these types of ventures would be able to benefit from not only the funding from rich philanthropists but their business acumen as well.
'Every story, if continued long enough, ends in death.' --Ernest Hemingway
That guy's argument is completely retarded. Yes, those large software companies get $60 billion less in pure profit, but its not like that money just evaporates---the businesses and individuals spending it will spend it on something else, maybe even something useful to their business.
Buying yet another Microsoft Office license and yet another Windows Vista license and yet another Adobe Photoshop license, etc. is the economic equivalent of fixing broken windows that are only broken because the software vendors can't keep them from breaking for more than a few years.
Wow! A thousand dollars for a report that tells proprietary software companies that open source is eating into their profits by forcing them to compete. I could have told them that for free.
I know your question was probably rhetorical but:
http://www.waterforpeople.org/
Mozilla Corporation (Firefox) and Mozilla Messaging (Thunderbird) are both non-profits. Or perhaps you're referring to something else?
not from a charitable approach, but from a foreign policy approach.
http://www.guptaoption.com/2.long_peace.php - Winning the Long Peace
http://www.guptaoption.com/5.open_source_development.php - Saving the World through Open Source
(also relevant: http://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/ - click on the infrastructure links.
Hexayurt - open source refugee shelter,
Writing open source software is not philanthropy. It is not a charity for the "have nots". Nor does it really create a better place stop wars, improve education.... Open Source is a politics of licensing. Just because it is free and the "Have Nots" can use it doesn't mean it is a philanthropic movement. You can use Open Source in a way to aid philanthropy. Giving people FOSS teaching them how to use it to improve their lives. But it is not philanthropy by itself. If you think that FOSS will save the world you have been smoking to much weed.
Zealot: Here you go here is the latest version of X11 it is open source look how good I am.
Have Not: In order for me to run this program I need an additional $600 in hardware to run this to get marginal features. Or I can feed a family of 4 for a month in America.
Most FOSS isn't written for philanthropy in mind. These are the normal reasons.
1. There was a gap in software that the program filled. It is either too small or to much of a hassle to publish commercially.
2. I worked on this with a large team of people and there is no way I could compensate all of them, if I decide to go commercial with it.
3. I want to gain fame as a good software developer, by making it OS, and if people like it, I could have some fame that I can put on my Resume.
4. I received value from other open source apps, and I want to return back to the community.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
"claiming that the charitable giving of Gates and others simply extends power in the market to power over society"
:D
so the idea is that bill gates should sponsor open-source?
ics
You are giving a very good reason why hardware vendors should *not* release the specs. So that their old hardware *can't* enjoy an extended life and they can sell new stuff.
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 farm were able to grow more food than the large farms could. The second policy is that of giving large western agribusinesses massive subsidies. Because of the billions of US taxpayer dollars businesses like Archer Daniels Midland, ADM, and Cargill get they are able to buy, ship, and sale corn to Mexico, where corn originated, for less than it costs Mexican farmers to grow corn.
And speaking of ADM, it is the queen of Corporate Welfare, and Cargill is the US's second largest privately held corporation.
FalconShould there be a Law?
I'm not sure where the "problem" is in that analysis. If Bill Gates's foundation cures malaria, then he'll certainly have a legacy as the guy who cured malaria. But just because he gets something out of it (a good legacy) doesn't mean that every single person who won't have malaria in the next 500 years is somehow harmed. In a way, it's a win-win transaction -- Bill Gates gets to feel good about himself and people in sub-Saharan Africa get to not have malaria. There's nothing mutually incompatible about those goals.
The contradiction in what the Bill and Melinda Gate Foundation is doing come from how it doing it. While the foundation is working to help people it has also invested in a corporation that pollutes in the Third World. The foundation is invested in Eni, an Italian petroleum giant, which has harmed people with the pollution it creates.
FalconShould there be a Law?
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 software would lead someone to know the software development industry can't do something to stop it. There are definitely alarmist words used in the subject, but 'disruptive' has a particular connotation to it that is not positive or negative with this sort of analyst. Cars were a disruptive technology, for example. Disrputive simply means the industry is being transformed and business's catering to the needs being fulfilled by open source software need to adjust the scale of resources used in those endeavors. If not wanting to scale down, they have to figure out how to get the revenue in different ways. Before cars, there was a much higher demand for horeshoes. As cars came to dominate, there remained a market for horseshoes, but a lot of the market evaporated and they either had to focus on other metalworking markets (cars being a huge metalworking market) or leave the market. Either way, they had to retrain and move on, but analysts wouldn't say that cars were a bad thing, just a very different thing.
And yes, I managed to cram a car analogy in.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Yea, I read his "A Modest Proposal" in high school, along with Chaucer's "The Canterbury Tails", which I have an edition of on my bookshelves, Charles Dickens' "A Tale of Two Cities", and "Beowulf". I recently found out the movie "Beowulf" was made though I don't know when.
FalconShould there be a Law?