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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."
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!
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?
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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.
Broken windows? Broken Windows (tm)? Something like that, anyway.
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
And therein lies the crux of the problem. If the enterprises that BUY the software dont have to pay for it then they will SAVE that money and increase their bottom line. This money thing is a zero sum game. All that is happening now is that the vast majority of all this loot is ending up in the pockets of billionaire bill and his cohorts. This wealth has been EXTRACTED from users (poor and rich alike). Try looking at this as a black box with inputs and outputs only. For the poor, open source allows them to keep this extracted wealth, even to pay themselves for additional open source development etc., etc. The mind boggles. Will future society be like that portrayed in Aliens or Star Trek? Society has been co-opted by the self-aggrandizing. The web, open source and hopefully other 'open' endeavours are beginning to RETURN CONTROL to us shmucks. Democracy and Enterprise (Capitalism) have proven themselves over time. Lets take them back from the turds.
A man spends the first half of his life accumulating stuff, the second trying to get rid of it all.
It also seems that a lot of times companies deserve to lose out to open source.
I purchased an expensive HP printer for the office, and yet HP refuse to provide me with the PPD files for it. This _forces_ me to use, and support, open source drivers.
I simply cannot understand why HP refuse to the provide the ppd file for their printers. It's plain text and probably wouldn't take them more than a day to write. Yet they seem to actively refuse to do so.
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.
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 This could easily have been written:
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 savings of $60 billion annually for businesses and consumers.
So clearly thier claim of "objective" is total BS.
5. Because it is fun
As for the zero-sum game; look up growth. For the all-caps extraction; you might consider a chapter on opportunity cost.
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.