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

You Can't Ever Win

[eldavojohn]

I haven't had a chance to read the entire essay, just the article and I must agree that there's so many caveats to 'giving.' There's no way in hell you're going to please everyone.

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

TAXES, TAXEs TAXES

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:TAXES, TAXEs TAXES

[RobBebop]

I have (one year) written off hours spent developing Open Source as "independent business losses" to avoid sending Uncle Sam a check for $1000 that my tax software told me I owed. The real value of my Open Source time contribution is obviously quite undefined, but I certainly could have spent the time (200-300 hours) that I estimate that I spent doing something for a much more profitable project - so I think it was justified.

Really, what would be great would be if Shuttleworth could create a "Non-for-profit" organization that we could register hours with and then take a tax deduction in April. In a fair economy, my time value of 300 hours would legitimately add up to a $10,000 deduction and that would be a huge boon to justify me to work harder developing Open Source (to "cost" proprietary software companies even MORE!!!).

[But seriously, I saw the number $60 Billion quoted earlier in the thread, and I read that as "Open Source software SAVES the national community of software buyers $60 Billion that they can allocate to more profitable areas of their business."]

Re:Bullshit

[FooAtWFU]

It's the socialeconomic structure that's broken, mostly because it *requires* penniless and poor and impoverished people in order to work. Not true. We can, today, reproduce most of the interesting work done by the Poor and Penniless people with machines, operated by (fewer) middle-class-ish people. And no one worries if poor, penniless machines suffer. However, this does mean that there are fewer opportunities available for unskilled labor. Society's real middle-long-term problem is to get those unskilled laborers a few Skills so they can do something useful and won't be completely obsoleted by a robot some day that's more cost-effective.

Unfortunately, there are some significant cultural barriers which can make this difficult. School, often seen as a prerequisite for many important skills, is never going to be as cool as sports (basketball) and hanging around with friends wasting time, so you need someone around who can really push children and youth to achieve - and many don't have that.