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."

Comments

www.waterforpeople.org

[srobert]

I know your question was probably rhetorical but:
http://www.waterforpeople.org/

Couple of essays on this kind of approach

[vkg]

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.

Re:Bullshit

[Cal Paterson]

It's the socialeconomic structure that's broken, mostly because it *requires* penniless and poor and impoverished people in order to work.

No it does not. Your mistake is called the Zero Sum Fallacy. There is a Wikipedia article but it isn't good enough to precisely dispel your mistake. This fallacy was basically debunked ~230 years ago by Adam Smith in the book that founded the subject of economics; The Wealth of Nations. In one of the first chapters Smith uses his own method of manufacturing; "The Division of Labour" to explain the economic theory of "Economies of Scale".

You could say that the first discovery of Economics was that Economics was not Zero-Sum, and that centuries later, most people (you included) are no better informed.