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

One thing was missing

[TubeSteak]

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.

Bullshit

[Project2501a]

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?

What I would like to see

[earthforce_1]

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.

Makes as much sense as the RIAA

[Nursie]

""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.

Re:Makes as much sense as the RIAA

[Anonymous Coward]

Exactly. My company is in the upper 50s of the Fortune 500... guess what? We use at least 7 F/OSS options to achieve our goals in my department. Funny thing? Other departments ask how we get so much done with such a limited budget (since they had to buy Software X for $1000 per seat, they can't afford Software Y, yet they notice we are able to do everything they could have done with Software X _and_ Software Y (and also Software Z and A, B, and C) and we still have budget available to spend on hiring more employees.

Yeah, F/OSS allows our department to spend 25% of what other departments spend and get 125% productivity out of our team.

How is F/OSS "costing" the industry money?!? Seems to me it's making us more money - perhaps the other companies are just jealous that we figured out how to capitalize on F/OSS and they are still paying a certain market hogging company for proprietary crap that stops being supported about a week after it finally works as it should.

Anywho, that's my 2 cents.

Re:You Can't Ever Win

[FooAtWFU]

"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. Mmm. Then that's $60 billion dollars in broken-window spending saved every year!

Broken windows? Broken Windows (tm)? Something like that, anyway.

Re:You Can't Ever Win

[Nephrite]

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 In other news, prostitution industry claims they lose $100 billion annually due to marriage sex.

Re:You Can't Ever Win

[Belial6]

I know that you are playing devils advocate, and pointing out the other side, so don't take this as a comment on your comment, just on the report.

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.