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Free Open Source Software Is Costing Vendors $60 Billion?
conan1989 writes to tell us that a recent report from the Standish Group is claiming that open source is costing the traditional software market somewhere in the neighborhood of $60 billion per year in revenue. "MySQL Marten Mickos has often spoken of 'taking a $10 billion market and making it a $3 billion market.' If you consider that open source has taken out $60 billion of traditional software revenues there will be a bloodletting in the proprietary world soon enough. It's a great time to be an open source company."
I pointed this study out yesterday during the "Is Open Source the Answer To Giving?" discussion and was promptly modded up, down, up, down, ad infinitum (probably because I was trying to merely provide the unpopular side/view of the issue but I digress).
More importantly, you should pay attention to the several insightful and interesting comments that followed which point out French Economist Bastiat's Parable of the Broken Window.
Whether you hate it or not, it does no good to ignore this contempt that so much of corporate America holds for open source! Take the time to inform your boss or coworker who claims losses directly to open source efforts.
My work here is dung.
This idea is an instance of the broken window fallacy. If the money had to have been spent on proprietary software, it wouldn't have been used for other things. In the end, FOSS software is a win for us all.
It's making the rest of us $60 billion richer. Of course, spread around 6 billion people, that's only $10 each, but yay us!
This kind of "Look how much money we're not making" is stupid regardless of who is espousing it. They're trying to prove a negative, and monetize a handful of nothing, and the sick part about it is that they honestly think that they're not completely crazy.
This is just like the RIAA trying to put a dollar figure on money lost to filesharing, or the press trying to put a dollar figure on "productivity loss" based on this or that sports event. They just need to get a freaking life, and start trying to measure things that exist.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
I wonder how this revenue is calculated. Is it done the same way that RIAA calculates lost revenue? If I install Open Office on my laptop, that doesn't mean that I would have bought proprietary software and put that on there if there were no Open Source options. Plus, is this factoring in the lower cost to develop software by using open source utilities?
If you are about to mod me down, keep in mind that this post was most likely sarcastic.
In the long run, it has balance out somewhere. Money doesn't disappear. It's the old overused notion of squeezing a balloon again... we have to figure out where the bulge is.
Will they NEVER stop whining.
It's pathetic.
Oh, my God, we need more Microsoft programmers.
Oh, my God, we need more h1b visa workers.
Oh, my God, the programmers we displaced are competing with us and winning.
that open source is saving those vendors' customers $60 billion.
Shouldn't it read: "Free Open Source Software Is Saving Consumers $60 Billion"?...
The wheelchair industry would be a $10 trillion dollar a year industry if people didn't have legs. But since people are indeed born with legs, it is a moot point.
Better known as 318230.
Partial dup? Wasn't the $60B debunked yesterday? Anyway, as a software vendor that depends on MySQL, I think this "open source is cool" story was just put out there by Sun's PR team to deflect attention away from their accidental "even more of MySQL will be pay-to-play" in the future announcement. Hey MySQL, thanks for the help getting my product to market, but now it's time for some vendor independence; buh-bye.
The headline for the glass is half full viewpoint.
That would be "costing other software vendors" in the same sense that the RIAA and the MPAA are "losing money from piracy". It makes the HUGE assumption that everyone who uses open source software is someone who would otherwise have purchased the "traditional" software. This is simply not true. However human beings are very good at pulling numbers out of their asses, and since politicians are used to talking shit, they readily believe these numbers.
Wow, let's make a law that outlaws open source software, to "protect" the "traditional" software industry. At the same time it will fight terrorism (because terrorists use open source software) and help the children (because open source is BAD). Yes you sarcasm impaired mods, learn to spot it when you see it.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Right.
It's not costing anything. It's competing. Very effectively, I might add.
In the same frame of mind, I'd be curious to know if this group also considers IT a "liability."
The cluelessness is simply astounding.
The title should read "Free Open Source Software is SAVING CONSUMERS $60 Billion" It is not costing vendors a dime.
FOXTROT UNIFORM CHARLIE KILO
A lost sale is not a cost. You could just as easily say that Microsoft is costing Red Hat money by selling server OSes. That would be as ludicrous.
I imagine that the local bands selling their CDs for five bucks apiece is costing the RIAA labels tons of money too. Know ahet? I consider it a GOOD thing.
I also consider it a GOOD thing that free software "costs" Microsoft money. Because, you know, I hate their software, I hate their business methods, and frankly I don't care too much for Gates and Ballmer.
Your bad is my good. Costing you? Well GOOD! Well done, FOSS! Here's to you kind sirs!
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
You can say anything with statistics, particularly when you're trying to show how much something costs.
I can take that exact same stat, and say that it's given businesses a $60 billion saving. Just think how much more competitive our businesses are now that they're saving all that money!
So you see, it's a double-edged sword: a cost to one person is a saving to another.
The fact is that when you start talking about that sort of money, it's never actually as clear-cut as a single statistic can make it sound. Anyone who does try to boil it down to a simplistic headline like that is almost certainly trying to put their own spin on it. (and yes, that includes me)
Okay first off, a better article than link in summary: Marketwire article
Now as for seeing the actual study: The Standish Group's "The 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.
That which does not kill me only postpones the inevitable.
Does your company have an internal IT department that maintains and repairs PCs? Then that company is stealing business from another company that is is the business of maintaining and repairing computers.
Does your local city government have a utility department that installs and repairs water pipes? Then that city government is stealing business away from local plumbers.
Do you cut your own hair or shave your own beard? Then you are stealing business away from your local barbers.
Absurd, isn't it?
I really object to the phrase "traditional software revenues". Open source has as long a "tradition" as for-profit software. Longer even?
...a market whose value was inflated beyond what the economics should dictate. eg: music/video distribution or long-distance telephony. The technology has matured and there is critical mass in distributed knowledge experts (ie slashdot readers), ubiquitous access to high speed data communications, and cheap hardware. The "$60 billion" value sounds like "a street value of" my 2c
The cost is a fallacy. But even assuming that was true, how many industries does Open Source allow?
ebay? Amazon? Google? Redhat? IBM? Many other shops gain efficiency from using Opensource (certainly in finance and healthcare).
Or to make a bad car analogy: How many billions in buggy whip manufacturers or buggy makers were lost to the automobile? hmmm? Or is the efficiency of the car a net gain on the horse drawn carriage?
when the report says that this costs the vendors about 60GigaDollar/year it just shows how extremly inefficient comercial production in the capitalist system is.
mond.
Specifically, the closed-source software vendors.
Consider: No matter how much marketing you have, it is ultimately up to the end user of a product to decide if they've gotten the value they expected to get. If said user finds that the closed-source product they paid (possibly) big bucks for isn't worth the media it was recorded on, they're going to cut their losses and try something else.
Alternatively, there are many small businesses that simply can't afford the kinds of prices that closed-source vendors often charge. I know this for a fact, because I'm one of those tiny businesses! If not for FreeBSD, Apache, and Postfix, to say nothing of the surplus hardware market, I would never have been able to get my Internet presence off the ground.
It's not just Freeware, either. How many of us have found low-cost Shareware products to be incredibly useful for the stuff we do, when comparable commercial products would have nearly required a second mortgage? Hex Workshop is, I think, a great example.
If that $60 billion figure is accurate, the commercial software vendors have no one but themselves to blame. Oh, there are some good values Out There, yes, but I think they've been largely drowned out by the flood of questionable products that are turned out with far more marketing than quality engineering.
Happy tweaking.
Bruce Lane, KC7GR,
Blue Feather Technologies
We just completed a study for a company selling bottled oxygen: the free availability of air on the planet causes them losses in the neighborhood of $866 billions in revenue -- annually!
In theory, money exists merely to facilitate the barter system by providing an abstract representation of wealth. We tend to associate a high dollar velocity with wealth creation, though the two are not really the same thing.
Open Source software is, by any reasonable definition, valuable. The individual programs are useful products that people want. Their existence makes the community (in this case, the whole planet) more wealthy. Therefore, open source is not the value-sink that its competitors would dress it up as being.
Maybe I am being naive about this, but the statement "Free Open Source Software Is Costing Vendors $60 Billion" could be phrased as "Free Open Source Software Is SAVING Companies $60 Billion." I would loosely say that the original statement could be correct, after all, how much would it cost to host a site if it wasn't for Apache, Bind, and Sendmail? Those three apps where the foundation of the Internet and are still the power houses today (well, ok, maybe not Sendmail so much on the enterprise level). Companies can take this money and use it for other products and investments. It sounds like a win win situation for most organizations... poor M$... however will they make money?
Don't click the above link, is a GNAA troll site.
Has anybody done an study on how much is generating for the users. Of course we have those same 60 billions saved. But I mean not only by direct savings in licenses, but by novel uses in places where licensed software would be uneconomical, new business that could not have been created otherwise, etc.
Rome taught me patience and assiduous application to detail. Virtues which temper the boldness of great, general views.
Economics should be viewed in a dynamic way. People and companies saved money and used that money to either save, build an addition to their house, buy an iPod, hire new employees, etc., etc.
Except for ending slavery, the Nazis, communism, & securing American independence, war has never solved anything.
Oh, just fuck off and die.
Seriously: why doesn't slashdot have some kind of a way to filter this ANNOYING BULLSHIT OUT.
Figure it out, because the next time I see this, I'm going to digg. The commentary is about as insightful, and often the reporting is less biased.
Another fallacy that is often used in reports like this or reports on software piracy is the idea that every copy that is floating out there for free would have been paid for if the software was somehow not available for free--either legitimately through FOSS or illegitimately through piracy.
That's simply not true.
For example, I can download Apache Derby for free and have a SQL engine for my various projects. Had Derby and MySQL and the like not been available, I wouldn't go out and buy a SQL product--chances are, I'd home grow my own custom database. For many of my projects SQL is overkill, but because its free, I may as well use SQL than a couple of fixed-width flat files--even though fixed-width flat files would probably work just fine.
Back in the 80's I knew a fellow who collected pirated software. He never used the software--he just collected it because he thought it was cool. Realistically, had it been impossible for him to collect software he would have never bothered. So realistically speaking while he had thousands of dollars of pirated software on his computer, because he never used it or had any need for the software he copied (it was just a weird hobby of his), he would never buy the software even if it was impossible for him to otherwise obtain copies. So he never represented a sale to the software makers whose wares he was copying.
One also has to wonder what economic benefit has arisen from FOSS. While its true that, for example, I'd hate to go into the database business--it's a complicated business and there is no money to be made because of MySQL and Derby and other free database engines out there--end-user applications seem to be thriving. "Infrastructure" software--stuff like databases and web servers and the like have become free, and going into a business to sell a $10k software solution to compete against Apache Tomcat would be silly. But on the other hand, how much value has been built on top of that infrastructure that simply wouldn't exist if that infrastructure was expensive and the barrier to entry high?
Are you too dense to ignore him or use the comment threshold filters? Yeah, go to digg. Like I give a shit. -CmdrTaco
One of the variants of the parable has the glazier paying people to break windows in the first place. Those are more accurate analogies to the non free software world. NDAs for simple things like text formats are a form of vandalism, especially when they are backed up by hardware NDAs, software patents and other nonsense. The whole market is still suffering from mistakes made back in the 1980s and it's a good thing to see the mistake coming to an end. Every dollar saved by free software is one that won't be used to screw you later.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
we must put an end to these terrorists! they are stealing our freedoms!... uh to sell you stuff and get rich... these do gooders.. I mean no gooders, must be punished for trying to do this to our profits! it's theft plain and simple!
The poor stability of Windows points to a more accurate version of the broken window parable, where the glazier is also the vandal.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
The main point is that it provides an alternative. So far as industry goes, the lifetime cost has nothing to do with the purchase price, it's embedded in the need for support, the cost of making changes, training (whether explicit, or implicit) and the platforms needed to run it over the software's life.
For these reasons the choice to go with software they can download for free, as opposed to a package that may cost 4 or 5 figures is usually never made on up-front price considerations.
Once the non-FOSS industry realises that it's quality, the ability to do the job and the availability of people who can use it effectively, rather than what the sticker on the front says - then they'll wake up to how they can really make successful software.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
Free Open Source Software Is Saving Buyers $60 Billion
i'll bet that in the beginning there was a market for electricity, too. and that it persisted until everyone needed it, and the barriers-to-entry were many and costly. and then it became public. when does this happen with operating systems? or is this when business attempts to take ownership of even those things that are, or should be, public? this is when 'the public interest' has to mean something. this is when privatization should be working in reverse. this is when governments need to represent the people, and not the conglomerates.
Maybe it was not worth $10 billion to begin with. Should we outlaw washing machines to push laundries forward, then? What about refrigerators taking away all the ice-sellers' market?
My 0.02 cents
Of course, that means the open source vendors are providing over $60 billion of additional value to customers, who are able to divert whatever would be spent on proprietary software to more productive use.
In other words, it is making the overall market more efficient. That's just Economics 101.
For those who try to spin this as some sort of problem, can you imagine if a single company owned a patent granting them exclusive rights to produce what Apache provides for free? The gains to said company would pale in comparison to the astronomical loss to the overall marketplace.
-- My choice of computing platform is a symbol of my individuality and belief in personal freedom.
It is, after all a free market. Consumers are free to judge the competing products on their merits and those consumers are selecting open source products more and more. This is what competition is all about, right? So if those traditional software companies would like to remain competitive they'd better get busy and develop products that suit the market's desire.
Those traditional software companies are finding themselves in the same situation as the music companies, the motion picture companies, and many others. These companies were created to package / distribute items that were scarce in society. The production process required special equipment / facilities, so there was a high cost for anyone else to enter the business.
This worked well for those companies until the information revolution put a powerful computer at nearly everyone's disposal - and connected it to a world-wide network. Since all the products mentioned here can be represented as digital data - this means that everyone can produce, package, and distribute these items at little or no cost. This breaks those traditional business models; what once was scarce is now plentiful.
The information revolution is still in progress; much corporate blood is yet to be spilled. Those companies which hold fast to the old ways will not survive, their attempts to make what is plentiful scarce will not be successful in the long term. There's still hope for some of them, though - if they can adjust to the new reality and break loose from the "new coat of lipstick on the same old pig" mentality there will be a place for them.
Disruptive technology (OK in this case a biz model) is always a motivator for innovation.
I'd rather the big boys were competing with $0 than within 10% of "what we choose to charge".
I love my OSX but I want Ubuntu etc. breathing down the necks of Mac and Win. I'll either switch at some point or get a better functionality or value in an OS out of one of those.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
Good job not doing any research at all. Despite the sensational headline a few days ago, Nothing that is Open source in MySql will be close sourced in the future. They will introduce a few add on backup products that will not be open, none of which exist today. So if you are happy with the current MySql, nothing is going to change. You'll still have full access to the course code you have today and any and all improvements that come in the future.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
I think both you and the Standish Group are making a mistake I call the RIAA fallacy. That's the assumption that every time somebody gets something for free (or very cheaply) it subtracts one from sales of a more expensive equivalent.
The truth is that cost often determines whether something gets purchased at all. If new cars are too expensive, people will make their existing cars last a year or two longer. (Or not replace their horse-and-buggy with a car, an insight that made Henry Ford rich.) People didn't even see the need for a personal computer until they became cheap enough for everybody to afford one. And if upgrading its IT is too expensive, a company will very likely make do with its existing IT.
Had Derby and MySQL and the like not been available,
Somebody would have written a free-ish SQL had not the likes of MySQL been available. FOSS developers aren't really good innovators(*) but they are darned good engineers and implementors and somewhere out there, somebody will be making what starts as a free clone of some sort of a popular RDBMS, and then evolves its own philosophy.
(*) By that, I mean, FOSS people aren't going to come up with some literary vision of computing, but, once they have a spec, they can write you a good one.
This is my sig.
-- The Judge in Life-Line
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
And in related news, the oil industry claims that bicycles are costing them 100 B$ a year of lost revenue in the US alone.
- Non-Smoking is Costing Toback Industry $1200 Billion.
... (f*&k cnet btw.)
- Healthy Food is Costing McDonalds $4.2 Trillion.
- Singing is Costing RIAA $5.4 Quadrillion.
- Islam is Costing Jack Daniels $43 Billion.
- You not Giving Me You Money is Costing Me $120.000.
You name it
And if you take a look at the javascript, it's all the confirmation we need that the GNAA trolls are pretty stupid (and probably 13-year-old kids).
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Hi! Do you enjoy paying taxes? Probably not. Especially if you happen to think most of the money confiscated for taxation goes to wasteful spending. It doesn't matter if you would happen to prefer cutting military spending over entitlement spending, or entitlement spending over military spending: one thing is for sure, most every citizen doesn't want to waste taxpayer money. And most every government appears hell-bent on extracting taxes for worthless purposes.
So why are we listening to these private companies whine about not collecting enough revenue from their product lines? Isn't it the same thing? That is: does it really advantage all economic players to pay more for a product than one must? Isn't that just throwing money away on worthless consumption as well?
Or is this yet more of that 'have your cake and eat ours too' bullshit that seemingly pervades the whole nexus of business / government interests? Because one thing is for sure, if individuals can't set the price of their own products and creations - even if that price is zero - then the one thing we don't have is a "free market". -M
I don't think the broken window scenario applies to this situation. Nothing is being destroyed, so the question isn't one of having to buy something vs not having to buy it. The question is buying expensive vs buying inexpensive, which is simple supply/demand economics. I'd go even further, and suggest that the "loss" is fictitious. It is really an overestimate of the sales on the proprietary software vendor's part.
If there is a loss anywhere, it's that only a fraction of the $60 billion is winding up in the pockets of open source developers. Granted, they're in it for the satisfaction of writing well written code, and the peer recognition that comes from that, but it wouldn't hurt for them to see some green from it as well.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
Talking to your neighbor over the fence is depriving a phone company of income.
Nothing is foolproof, fools are too ingenious. - Murphy
If, instead of saying "open source has taken out $60 billion of traditional software revenues," the article said "open source has saved businesses over $60 billion in expense compared to traditional software," don't you think people might view it differently?
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
Open Source actually does have serious problems, but taking money from secret-code companies is not one of them.
The biggest problem with open source is the assumption on the part of the code writers that the users know as much about the code subject that they do. In other words, a serious lack of documentation oriented towards users who aren't going to be contributing to the code upkeep, who don't care how it works, and simply want to use the code as a tool to get a particular job finished quickly and easily. And with open source, the more specialized the application that it was written for, the more likely that the user interface is incomprehensible and the more likely that the code authors assume that the users know as much as they do.
These problems exist in commercial code but they get solved much quicker because the code's sales depend on its ability to be effective and to be easily used. Open source programs get presented and distributed as completed 'products' when their level of completion is roughly half of what commercial code presents for the same solution.
Basically the value of the money that you save by using open source is more or less equal to the time that you have to spend researching and learning all the things that the code's writing group assume that you already know.
For example, take a program to edit video copied from a DVD. The commercial code is expensive, but relatively easy to use and has extensive Help sections. The open source versions are screens full of randomly placed buttons and selection boxes that are labeled with acronyms. Help files, if they exist at all and are not simply URLs, are written with the assumption that you are already a professional digital video editor.
And yet open source advocates will claim that the programs are equal in ability because a skilled and experienced professional can figure out how to get them both to work.
These problems are much less in the open-source applications that attempting to position themselves as direct competitors to commercial software: programs like GIMP, LINUX, and OpenOffice. In a few cases, like FireFox, the open source is as transparently good as (to the average user, to the power user, they are much better than) the Windows browser.
The idea that there is a financial number that quantifies the extent that open-source has directed sales away from from commercial software is absurd. The numbers that they cite have been (to coin a phrase) 'pulled out of their ass'. Completely meaningless. The more open source software that becomes available, the more that the management of commercial software companies will have to understand that they are providing a support service and not a tangible product.
What's in a name? That we call our code
By any other name would smell as sweet.
So Open Source would,
were it not Open Source call'd,
Retain the same perfection which it's owed
Without that title...
-- shakespear.wil@theglobe.london.england
So, since the concept of intellectual property exists solely to incentivize the creation of *stuff*, how exactly can you justify the patents/copyrights for all those "lost" sales?
"Factory windows are always broken.
Somebody's always throwing bricks,
Somebody's always heaving cinders,
Playing ugly Yahoo tricks.
Factory windows are always broken.
Other windows are let alone.
No one throws through the chapel-window
The bitter, snarling, derisive stone.
Factory windows are always broken.
Something or other is going wrong.
Something is rotten -- I think, in Denmark.
End of the factory-window song."
--Vachel Lindsay
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
Excellent! $60 billion that can be used to build business, rather than sunk into proprietary software.
sloth jr
I'm still laughing while typing this response. Thank-you!
-FL
Bicycles cost automobile industry $30 BILLION DOLLARS in lost revenue. The damage done by walking is incalculable.
Remember! If it walks... it's a terrorist.
Cwm, fjord-bank glyphs vext quiz
An associated issue with open source is paradigm exposure.
How many people out there would really know SQL if it weren't for open source databases? The end user base has grown significantly because of it - but also the knowledge within the development community. If it weren't for open source, the closed source vendors would have a much smaller pool of potential employees and they would be paying larger salaries to less qualified people.
The same holds true for countless other horizontal markets.
Open Source drives people in a way that no University can. It opens up a learning environment to people who otherwise would not be interested in pursuing things. Sure, if you can't make a product better than an open source one, it hurts - but if that's the case, the value of the intellectual property your company has invested in is much lower than you realized.
Perhaps the authors of the report mean to vaporize those savings by charging $1000 per copy of the report? I'm not even kidding, trying to find the actual report resulted in my confronted by that price...
Palm trees and 8
Suggesting I didn't buy an enterprise Oracle license because I installed MySQL isn't just a Broken Window Fallacy. For the tiny purpose I needed it for, it's more like suggesting that because nobody has written my Peugeot off, Ferrari are out of pocket the price of a 612 Scaglietti.
"I Know You Are But What Am I?"
This reminds me of a survey I read about somewhere... can't seem to find it. One question read (something like), "You pay ten dollars for movie tickets but, halfway through the feature, you decide the movie really stinks. Do you (a) stay for the rest of it so as to get your money's worth, or (b) leave immediately?" According to the source which I have not yet found, people who were fiscally successful tended to answer (b).
Time to leave the {insert your favorite software here} Movieplex, people!
Sometimes I have to say to hell with it and just eat my jellybeans.
This is Slashdot. We know that there is no need to pay people to break Windows. It was already broken when we got here
I often wonder how many billions all the free high-quality insight and advice that we give out here at Slashdot costs consultants in lost revenue.
Open Source is great at solving the problems that the developers need solved. It's rarely as good at solving the problems that non-developers need solved but developers don't, because developers are rarely interested in donating their time to solving these problems. Not only is there no incentive to solve them, but they are often not even aware that these problems exist, and solving them often involves a far less pleasant kind of work.
Documentation and user interface design is a common casualty of this phenomenon.
There are, however, a number of big exceptions to this. Some are the result of developers who really are fascinated by the problems of writing software for mere humans, some are the result of end-users who are also software developers, but most are the result of companies and organizations paying people to do the work, one way or the other.
And not all of these started out as proprietary packages that were open sourced for one reason or another: some are internal projects in organizations that need the product but aren't interested in being in the software business (though that's no guarantee of quality: most internal projects are no better than they have to be), some are open source projects that have a sugar daddy, some are dual-licensed products piggybacking on both the open source movement and the commercial software market, but the key ingredient for all of them is that the developers are paid to do the hard boring work of polishing the product.
I think that this money is usually more important than the goals of the original developers. There have been many open source projects intended to produce a competitor for commercial programs that never got anywhere, because it's to hard to sustain the kind of effort it takes to turn a project into a product on a volunteer basis.
Fascinating.
When you replace process "A" with process "B", and achieve a 10x fold reduction in cost, you've increased efficiency.
So, open source software development is literally 10x cheaper than closed source software development; and that also goes for maintenance, procurement, service, yadda yadda. Sounds like "Total Cost of Ownership" to me.
No one would ever, ever argue that a new way of producing solar cells at an order of magnitude cost savings would be a bad thing; so why is it bad in the IT world. Look at it this way, if most of these customers are budget constrained, cutting their costs significantly means they'll purchase more IT products/services. Sure, some of the money will be saved and go into profit or other budget priorities, but this is the very definition of efficiency in a capitalist economy. All it really means is what I've been saying for a long time, that Open Source is an effective tool to reduce the monopoly profits which are generated by holding prominent software copyrights. And, as everyone already knows, monopoly profits are economic inefficiency.
Bravo, FLOSS community. We know we are on the path to victory when our interest are aligned with capitalism, and all we have to do now is make sure that no government intervenes on the behalf of yesteryear's White Elephants.
WhiteWolf666 an exBush supporter. All you new-school,compassionate,save the children Republicans can rot in hell
Study finds FLOSS is saving corporations and individuals $60 Billion / year.
It's all in how you look at it.
Stop-Prism.org: Opt Out of Surveillance
I have always said the choice between a closed source software solution and an open source software solution is where you spend the money. Open source isn't free. In many cases the cost of Open source is in the people who run it. It takes an elevated mindset and often skill set to deploy and manage an open source solution in a corporate environment.
This is ultimately why I support open source software, because it promotes people, not companies. And once you get the Open source routine down, the options before you as an individual become vast.
excuse me, but despite im a programmer myself, i dont remember society making a contract to software vendors guaranteeing a certain tribute was to be paid in the form of revenues. this is a free market world, and noone has to feed any industry. noone has to fill your coffers. if there are more viable alternatives, they choose them. and market spends the inflated $60 zillion or whatever resource that is not spent to fill your coffers for something else.
Read radical news here
F/OSS is to window makers what an unbreakable window would be to a conventional window.
Which is what it is to a certain maker of Windows®!
C'mon people! Get your game in gear, and triple this figure!
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
$60 billion in revenue would probably be closer to $15 billion in profits (assuming generously high margins), so we have $15 billion in producer surplus lost. A bad thing for sure, but I'm curious about the increase in consumer surplus from OSS. It'd be the $60 billion (which goes directly to those who get those OSS alternatives for free), plus the utility generated by anyone who benefits from the OSS software that wouldn't have paid for the closed source counterparts. My guess is that second component is a lot. This could easily be a $100 billion net gain for society, maybe more.
And if you don't like the thought of paying Sun for a MySQL backup solution, you're more than free to write up your own. What's the problem?
Understanding the scope of the problem is the first step on the path to true panic.
If there is a loss anywhere, it's that only a fraction of the $60 billion is winding up in the pockets of open source developers. Granted, they're in it for the satisfaction of writing well written code, and the peer recognition that comes from that, but it wouldn't hurt for them to see some green from it as well.
I'm going to play devil's advocate a bit. (1) Introduction of the profit motive will incentivize these developers to act more like the profit oriented companies they are displacing. (2) Doing so will just make them displaceable by other developers who are motivated by non-profit goals and allow users to retain the full savings.
Open source gives all power to the users, with that power goes the savings. It's a little late to claim that developers should receive a larger share of the savings "pie", open source developers have essentially engaged, perhaps unintentionally, in a pricing war characterized as "a race to the bottom" in economic terms. They are giving away their services for free to serve altruistic or educational goals, or possibly in the hopes that they will be selected for some possible customization in the future. Such "races to the bottom" are characterized by commodity pricing and interchangeability of suppliers.
Deliberately giving away Software without extracting the maximum number of dollars the market can bear? Giving Free Rides? Oh, I know. . , I know, but my friends, it gets even worse. Because as it turns out, many of these anti-American programmers are writing and giving away this free software from their very own home computers! The Workers owning the Means of Production? Well, I can tell you, I've never read a book on the subject before, but I HAVE dutifully absorbed enough state dogma to know that that spells COMMUNISM, and I object!
As red-blooded Americans, it is our DUTY to give huge corporations price-fixed monopolies over every last industrial sector. That's why we call it the Free Market!
Now, I know, some people say that this is hypocritical, and even schizophrenic, but I don't know what those words mean. What I do know is that when the little guy doesn't have to pay for a piece of bloated software, he can take that money and use it to buy OTHER products, which is the same as getting those other products for FREE! And that's theft in my book! Punishing companies which are not even connected to the software industry by buying their products with money they shouldn't even have! It's a blood-bath out there!
And what about the programmers? The computer specialists giving their work away for free? --They're shooting themselves in the foot! --Why, when they give away free software, they encourage millions of people who would otherwise not be able to afford to use computers, TO USE COMPUTERS. And when the market is bloated with so many users taking a free ride, who is going to take care of those computers? Who is going to write the millions of lines of unique code needed to maintain such a vast networked community? Who is going to help those corporations needing to capitalize on those millions of potential customers, whose pockets are brimming with all the money they didn't need to spend on word processors and operating systems? WHO will write THAT software, I ask you?
Yes, these open source programmers are a blight on the American economy. When people write software on their own computers and give it away in acts of neighborly good will and enthusiasm, America suffers. It SUFFERS, and I won't stand for it!
-FL
I love linux, firefox, pyhon, etc ...
I like programming!
I participate in open source projects.
I don't want to be a consultant
I don't want to be a corporate drone - but I am.
Are you really sure you want all software to be open source?
Are you sure you want to be a consultant? A sales person? A project manager?
You want to be a programmer? - You have no value! Programms are cheap and free! Just fix this bug and shout up!
What has happened to the guild of programmers???
Some putz reputedly in the 'oil industry' claimed he wrote a piece of software once to help predict oil marketting trends. Claimed it cost $20K per copy, and whined when everybody and their monkey in the oil industry wouldn't buy it.
Understanding the scope of the problem is the first step on the path to true panic.
While there has been a number of very serious comments and good points about this, I feel like making a slightly more spontaneous contribution to the discussion:
BOOOM! HEADSHOT!
In related news, the Sheriff of Nottingham has announced that poverty has increased 600% since Robin Hood arrived. "The lack of money in the King's treasure vault is more than enough proof that poverty has invaded our glorious country", he said.
SQL is a really, really bad example. Tons of people would know it since Oracle, IBM, and Microsoft all offer free versions of their Database products for reasons that have nothing to do with competition from MySQL and PostgreSQL. The fact is that a great number of organizations require a local database to operate on things like laptops and PDAs. As such, you have free express/lite versions of enterprise databases that are limited to 1 to 4 gigs and lack some advanced features.
These are fully functional database engines that are more then perfect for learning anything you want to learn about databases, and to top it off, they all have more features then MySQL, which isn't even acceptable as a learning tool. PostgreSQL is viable alternative for learning SQL with datasets that are larger then 4gigs, but it has shortcomings that limit it in other regards.
Besides, you don't buy a database for the database engine. You buy it for the whole infrastructure that comes with it. This of course leads us to the big problem with the artical. Since they are quoting someone from MySQL, you can bet they are comparing MySQL to DB2, Oracle, and SQL Server. Of course, this is a total joke since MySQL doesn't even come close to being comparable with any comercial database. It is really off in it's own catagory of quasi-database software.
Come one, come all Vendors!
You say you've been paying too much for Free Open Source Software??
Websites charging you $50/copy for Mozilla Firefox???
COME NOW TO AC'S OPEN SOURCE SOFTWARE EMPORIUM!!
- Mozilla Firefox, $15/copy!!
- Apache Tomcat, $20/copy!!
- OpenOffice.org (Full Professional Edition), only $30/copy!!
These are fully licensed copies, ready to use immediately after download! Don't delay! Act NOW before these amazing prices are gone!
Assuming it is true that FOSS is costing vendors $60 billion, wouldn't you think it's about time to start embracing FOSS and it's wonderful model instead of trying to fight it off like some sort of cancer? *Cough Microsoft cough cough*.
Once this Open Source problem is disposed of, we need to turn to the next issue.
Millions of people read books by people like Charles Dickens and Jane Austen, without any royalties going to modern authors. Upstanding citizens like Stephen King don't get paid unless they write something people would rather read than something by Poe or Hawthorne.
We need to establish the right to be paid for writing bad fiction, without unfair competition from people like that Shakespeare guy. (Actually, I personally wouldn't mind being paid for writing unsalable fiction, but that's another story.)
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
I find it entertaining that the proprietary software crowd seems to feel entitled to any and all profits to be made. What a farce. Next thing they will want government subsidies to make up for the "losses." Thing is, in todays world, they will probably get it - at our expense! If you want to compete with Open Source you simply need to make a product that I feel is better and worth paying for. Why, just last year I lost over $100 billion because I didn't own M$.
As other's have pointed out in several ways, losing revenue to competition is not a cost. Putting that aside for the moment, I do think the soft cost of some of my proprietary sw choices over the years is a true cost. Let's say an IT staff spends 15% of the year dealing with the short comings of proprietary sw... if we tally that across the industry, I bet it's not that small a cost (even relative to imaginary $60 B loss). How much time has been spent dealing with mal-ware due to a particular OS (or its associated email clients) being insecure? I suspect that time represents a HUGE cost.
It may be costing the "traditional" software market 60 billion a year in revenue...
But consider therefore, that it's saving customers 60 billion and possibly a lot more (less costly for customers to maintain license compliance etc).
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
it seems like every slashdot thread is threatened with a variant of the Godwin law,
"As a Slashdot discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Microsoft or Windows/Vista approaches one."
Microsoft while huge in the high tech industry is still built on the traditional model from it's founding in the 70/80's (no I don't have details).
Regardless of the nose in the air Linux users (I use Linux and Solaris) Microsoft is simply the least efficient OS available but not actively bad. It's the MiniVan of computing. It has it's place.
Sorry about the writing. Robot fingers, you know? Cliff Steele in DOOM PATROL #23
"It's a great time to be an open source company" - Other than a warm fuzzy feeling that you're making the software world a better place, why give your product away for free? Can this business model last forever?
"During My Service In The United States Congress, I Took The Initiative In Creating The Internet." -Al Gore
We now have an alternative besides running pirated or bought windoze.
I personally only use GPL'd software. And I'm very very happy with it.
Disclaimer: I'm far from an open source zealot, and while I've been 100% free software based for years, I'm currently 90% commercial software, both at home (which I personally paid for every single bit, not a single pirated software) and at work.
Seriously... thats silly. Open Source just diversify the market. Instead of SQL Server and Oracle saturating the market with a poorly suited solution, you have PostgreSQL and MySQL (and more) catering to a segment of the market which doesn't require SQL Server and Oracle, and let the big names (I use those 2, there's more) commercial ones fill up the rest of the market, or force them to add more value (for example, ETL, Datawarehouseing, etc) by making basic feature a commodity (if all you need is flat tables to run SQL on, you don't need Oracle).
So really, Free Software isn't taking money from anyone... they just force market expension. If free databases didn't exist, the commercial databases would have less features than now, and going after a smaller niche, to sell probably exactly the same amount of licenses as they are selling now.
The development of the automobile is costing the traditional blacksmith industry an estimated $3 billion a year.
I guess you could say that the $10b database market didn't grow to that amount because of open source, but only if you're counting a loss of revenue per website hosted on MySQL (or each MySQL installation). However those websites wouldn't have existed if they had to pay for MySQL, or they would have used plain text databases, or some other technology.
A company moving from Oracle to MySQL should have its head examined.
On the other hand without MySQL, PostgreSQL, etc, Oracle and MSSQLServer could have far higher licensing costs that aren't actually a fair reflection of their value to the market. Oracle is still a stupidly high price, but there is OracleXE now.
It's survival of the fittest. Database costs were so high in the past, people felt it necessary to write alternatives, and over time those alternatives improved to be competitive because there was such a demand. This means that the market was never $10b in value, only in price for a short time until the unsustainable price created competition that brought the market down to its true value.
Oh, i'm wittering here now and someone who's studied finance and business will shoot me down anyway.
Compare it to what Japan had done to US car markets! Or what China is doing to electronics, tools and several other areas. The prices have dropped dramatically!
What a market heaven would US have without Asian import of too-low priced components...
OSS is just increasing competition and dropping prices.
I think I'm going to create a company that produces breathable air. And every year I'm going to complain about the billions of dollars of revenue that all the people who breathe free air are COSTING me. Damn communists screwheads!
Or perhaps the headline should be, "News Flash: marketing group makes inflammatory statement to remind people they still exist."
In other words....nothing to see here, please move along.
Public libraries have gotten away with this kind of larceny for decades!!
You could also say that computer users are SAVING $60 billion...
However, having worked in retail, I know that these loss projections include profit in addition to overhead and labor. The there maybe no actual loss since there is no actual investment by the company into open source development.
Not to mention the value of innovation that open source adds to the industry. I think a clear example of the gain of open source is the recent Creative feud with the independent driver programmer. His labor and results had no cost to the corporation. Ultimately, the open source drivers were *adding value* to the non-functioning and disabled hardware.
I'm not a business-minded guy at all and I'm not trolling, that's for sure. But reading the story, I couldn't help but ask myself: maybe the FOSS world is taking over proprietary software vendors' market shares, but is it also taking their revenues? Aren't most FOSS companies still struggling to find a viable, if not largely profitable, business model? And isn't the FOSS world as a whole still mainly supported by the proprietary-oriented activities of its components (from Sun to MYSQL)? I don't think FOSS is coming to an end, but - if my assumptions are true - it doesn't seem too healthy, either.
By taking out unnecessary business costs, you put the revenue somewhere else where it actually matters. You end up with both free software and $60 Billion dollars somewhere else, instead of just $60 billion dollars.
Most Congresscritters cost about the 'cost' of tax cuts and how they can 'pay' for them, as if it were their money. Rarely do you hear them talk about the 'cost' to citizens of raising taxes or spending.
It is much the same mentality at work when they talk about how much OSS has 'cost' businesses.
Isn't that really how the headline should read?
If vendors are claiming $60 billion in lost revenue. Revenue is payments-received-before-profit, or in other words, the license fees they are charging their customers - the "retail" price of a software package (or negotiated price for large purchases) and the support/maintenance contract.
So what this really means is that open source is saving users $60 billion in license fees and support contracts.
Edith Keeler Must Die
So can I get a tax deduction for my PCs? The OS's that are now defunct?
If not, THERE'S NO FECKING AMORTISATION.
But now I should try to install something I've bought, it won't go in. Yet MS still have copyright on it.
I've lost and MS is sitting on it to ensure I STILL PAY.
Sounds like a loss to me.
And a real one.
I think it applies the opposite way -- the fallacy of the broken window is that the shopkeeper is forced to spend money he otherwise doesn't have to. He spends money on the glazier, instead of the baker -- the glazier could then spend money on the baker.
In this story, the proprietary vendors are the glaziers. The glazier may indeed lose business, but it is no cost to the economy as a whole, and it is a benefit to the shopkeeper, who can now spend money on things other than software.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
One the one hand, proprietary companies scoff at F/OSS, claiming that F/OSS market share is insignificant. On the other hand, proprietary companies claim F/OSS is killing their revenue stream.
Which is it?
Free is hardly the only reason people are choosing open source software. If it was, Apple would have disappeared a long time ago. No one uses software that doesn't work or doesn't do what they need it to do. Vendors are discovering that once their products are subject to some competition, they have to compete on merit. For some of them, this is the last thing they want.
Since they can't admit that open source software does the same thing, they are left with the cost argument. On its face, it sounds good, it truly is difficult to compete with free. But look at Adobe's Photoshop. It costs a ungodly amount of money, yet more graphic artists and photographers use it than use The Gimp.
Before cars were introduced, deliveries in cities (and elsewhere) were all done by horse-drawn carriage. The large number of horses involved required much grain and feed, and many people were involved in horse-related industries.
In addition, there were many street cleaners whose job it was to clean up after the horses.
Basically, a new mode of operation may cost one industry but will benefit a new one.
will be usable in the closed source application that Sun will make.
They will be able to improve YOUR code for THEIR benefit and leave YOU out.
Open Source saves buyers $60 Billions?
Dag B
...and not having to buy proprietary software is you can now use that money for a 5% DOWN PAYMENT on a support contract which you will DEFINITELY need!!!
What a ridiculous argument. His statement is accurate if you replace "costing vendors" with "creating wealth for consumers."
This is basic economics. While it's true that the buggy whip makers lost a lot of money after the model T, society as a whole gained immensely more in aggregate (and in some cases, even in one case) than the buggy whip makers lost. That's trade, and that's progress. As long as the market's efficient, everyone ~except~ the metaphorical buggy maker should applaud anytime an industry's "losing" to a better competitor.
Just look at how the automobile industry undermined the buggy-whip business.
Have gnu, will travel.
I would wager my life savings (not a lot of money sadly) that this guy's report is based on the simple assumption that if people weren't using FOSS software, they'd be buying some proprietary solution. I believe that assumption is absolutely true. However, to say it is 'decimating the traditional software market' requires that you define the 'traditional software market.' I'd guess that means Oracle, Novell, Microsoft, etc. and to that I say "SO WHAT??". If that's the case, the traditional software market can go fuck itself. They never offered me a job.
I'd wager the software development industry has grown dramatically because of the availability of FOSS. The idea of handing $60B to those old dinosaurs and watching them spend it on garbage like Vista makes me sick. If I had to purchase Windows Server 2003/2008/whatever to start programming it never would have happened.
Slashdot readers not buying this report has now cost The Standish Group $60 BILLION DOLLARS!!!
conan1989 writes to tell us that a recent report from the Standish Group is claiming that open source is costing the traditional software market somewhere in the neighborhood of $60 billion per year in revenue.
... what George Guilder termed "creative destruction." Individual organizations and long-standing business models will fall by the wayside, but the benefits to society will be great.
It's a problem for software companies that have been jerking their customers around for decades and gouging to a Biblical degree. There's a phase change in software development occurring, no different in principle from the switch from horse-drawn carriages to automobiles, or physical distribution of music to purely electronic. Those with a heavy investment in the old way of doing business will get screwed, to be sure, unless they adapt
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
And in other news OSS saves consumers $60 billion. Somebody get me a frickin shark
"open source has saved businesses over $60 billion in expense compared to traditional software, and created a new multi-billion dollar support industry."
That wasn't hard, was it?
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
When you buy proprietary software, you buy software that has already been developed. What you typically cannot get at any price is the modifications that you need to make it work properly for you. When you buy open source software, you either pay for a service contract or you pay to develop the functionality that is not there yet. The consequence of this is that in stead of a commodity, software is more like infrastructure.. it is there for all and as long as we pay our taxes to keep up the maintenance, we all benefit. Thanks, GerardM
If a vendor wants to complain about how much open source is hurting its business, then first stop USING any open source software, libraries, or open standards. Let's see how well you do without the internet or even email.
Sure sounds like biting the hand that feeds you....
and thus forcing them to innovate??? :o
We can't have this...
You feel sleepy. Close your eyes. The opinions stated above are yours. You cannot imagine why you ever felt otherwise.
Only aspiring monopolists count their competitors' revenues, and their customers' savings, as "losses".
Why is it everyone is always worried about the bottom line? Everyone in the country worries about whether the GDP is going up or down or overseas. What does it matter that OSS cost M$ and other billions of dollars, even if it is an accurate number. Does Bill Gates need the money? Do the already wealthy stock holders need the money? Or is it more important that all the people that actually use computers get a useful product? The whole system is set up so that companies try to make a product that everyone wants, but has planned obsolescence, or planned failure time, just so they can make a new version and sell it to you all over again? (I have yet to hear a compelling reason why Vista is better than XP, or at least so much better that it didn't make sense to just create another service pack for XP) Instead of worrying about the bottom line, why don't we all create a goal, and work to achieve that goal. Instead of trying to sell the same broken stuff to each other all the time we could actually try to accomplish something useful. This would probably mean more jobs for everyone. (And I bet in the long run our GDP would go up anyway.) Oh wait, that's exactly what the open source community did, and it scares the crap out of people who are greedy for the sake of greediness. Notice how M$ isn't out there trying to make a superior product or making any attempt at all of not angering their customer base. Instead they are complaining that the rules aren't fair, even as they try to set up a monopoly.
Eschew Obfuscation
Open source can be nice because it allows the customer of a particular piece of software who isn't big enough to get a modification made to have the ability to do it. Free software is another matter. This is a corporation's dream. Software that is created by individuals free of charge that the corporation can redistribute or sell support contracts for? Priceless. Redhat? IBM? They don't have to write the software, but they are enriched by the distribution and support of it. Yes there may be a net positive result to the economy when small businesses use the software but make no mistake the value of doing the actual programming starts to tend towards zero. Add outsourcing and offshoring and it will be only hobbyists that produce software. Interesting that the 'egalitarian' giving of software tends to hurt those who give it (who might sell their skills otherwise) and enrich those who would formerly have had to pay for the software.
The alternative title which says the same thing is: "Free Open Source Software Is Saving Companies $60 Billion A Year".
This whole thing is backwards. All of software companies I've worked at, for the last 13 or 14 years, have benefited from Open Source Software at one level or another. In these cases anyway the products gained features, or time to market that would have otherwise taken years of manpower and money to develop in house. Has anyone bothered to explain this to the economists?
Yes. This is slashdot. Trolls are not judged on the quality or relevancy of their trolling material, they are instead judged on the quality of their javascript. Magnificent.
Just another "DOJ fascist authoritarian totalitarian bootlicker" -- Zeio
they are perfectly happy to let the market decide when it's in their favour, but they can't handle the double egded nature of the beast.
when they say "60 billion was taken out of the industry", what they really mean is 60 billion wasn't spent on THEM, whaa wahaa someone call the whaaaabumlance.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
While I'm sure the numbers are questionable, I do like the implication that Free Software has grown into the equivalent of a $60 billion market. That makes us bigger than the Chinese chip market http://www.purchasing.com/article/CA6518735.html and auto electronics http://www.instat.com/press.asp?Sku=IN0603375RE&ID=1752
Do you know how much money home cooked meals are costing the restaurant industry?
GP is incorrect, parent understands the broken window fallacy correctly. The point of the broken window fallacy is that what seems like a loss for the economy (less $$$ made in the software industry/glazier), is in fact a gain for the economy (same useful effect (software vs window), $$$ spend somewhere else).
... that free (as in beer) software cuts the number of non-free sales?
This doesn't mean that it costs society, or even the industry any money, just that it's relocalized to other parts.
Manufacturers of compressed air complain of huge financial losses due to "free air" being widely available to consumers.
Ethernet being free is costing token ring vendors and TCP/IP being free is costing SNA et cetera.
Air is currently free to breath. Imagine how much money is being "lost" by not charging people to breath.
Try hard to forget that a subsidized or free infrastructure (e.g. the US interstate system) enables previously impossible businesses.
Internet movie download will destroy the billion dollar industry of brick and mortar video stores like blockbuster.
Why don't we just outlaw charitable giving while we are at it since "free" is evil.
I think that when a vendor creates and plans to put on the market a product, they project what revenue they will collect. I see this all the time, and I know that you all do as well, "JBL hopes to sell 18 million pairs of their new speaker". So what the article is really trying to accomplish here, is the well-known fact that Microsoft (as an example...the best example in this scenario) makes a product that is easily hackable, stealable and redistributable, therefore they DO lose money on their projected profits. They do. Not only do they lose revenue on the stolen versions, but in turn, the people that ARE buying licensed copies of XP or Vista, are only buying them once (after the third time you have to fresh install, just call M$'s Indian tech support line and they will give you a new serial...I'll get to this topic in a minute), so there is a one time payment. There is no continuing revenue, so once, let's say, 60% of M$'s projected revenue is in their proverbial pockets, the other 40% has been stolen. Now, this is partly their fault, if not all their fault, and the fault of every software vendor who cries about lost revenue. Write good code, fire the idiots that slop it up, hire fresh fingers, and for fucks sake, (ahemADOBEahem) STOP MAKING US PAY A YEARS SALARY FOR YOUR PRODUCTS, because you know what? PaintShopPro X2 is PHENOMINAL. And only $80. What is PScs3, $500? Fucks sake. I'm getting off point, but not really. People are fed up with expensive broken software. People are hungry for new, cheap, and more (money in their pockets, available software alternatives). So, what do people turn to when this dilema arrives? They write their own code. They not only write it, but they share it, because they know that they are not the only one with this frustration. Huge companies whose sole business is to 'empower the world with their amazing productivity software' are naturally (and in some ways rightfully[self-righteously]) angry, worried, and zealous) of this OpenSource boom. I can see the logic. But I can also raise a middle finger to their cause, because again, this is what happens when people are fed up with your horrible business practices, awful (let me say that again) AWFUL support (Microsoft is NOT alone on this ahemLINKSYSahem), and just general sneaky consumer fuckery (see free licenses by just asking the Indian tech support). If it's that easy to gain a new license to your product, why not just allow that anyway? You buy the product, you own it. It's yours to do with whatever you wish! No, I won't buy another copy just to gain a license. No, I won't. Guildwars, the game is a prime example of this. That is their motto. It's right on the front of the box. What's the problem with this business model? They make a great product that sells really well, and will continue selling well due to also great expansion packs, and it's yours to keep and play online as long as you wish. Bravo! WoW on the other hand...well, let's just say I won't be shelling out $15/m ever. Enemy Territory. Free game. Free online play. Free updates. FUN game. Bravo!
My brain's fried.
Over and out.
The article's terrible economic reasoning is exactly the kind of folly that dooms planned economies. The defense of established interests is cast as defense of the common welfare, and the economy gets gummed up with mandatory crud that is deemed essential even though nobody wants it.
In a market system, companies aren't be allowed to justify their existence through whining. If a software vendor can't offer something that people want to buy, then they serve no economic purpose.
If you think open-source software "costs" the economy money by displacing commercial software, then I suppose you also think it's a straightforward win to ban cheap, superior imported goods so domestic manufacturers can sell inferior, overpriced goods.
Heh.
I'm no javascript expert, but anyone should know that there is a better way than this in any programming language. Note the variable called "imagecount"... I guess images.length was too advanced?
var images = new Array();
var imagecount = 26;
images[0] = 'images/penisbird.gif';
images[1] = 'images/awesome.jpg';
images[2] = 'images/hello.jpg';
images[3] = 'images/hotblowjob.jpg';
images[4] = 'images/zoidberg.jpg';
images[5] = 'images/tubgirl.jpg';
images[6] = 'images/harlequin1.jpg';
images[7] = 'images/Pain2.jpg';
images[8] = 'images/harlequin2.jpg';
images[9] = 'images/Pain3.jpg';
images[10] = 'images/harlequin3.jpg';
images[11] = 'images/Pain4.jpg';
images[12] = 'images/Pain5.jpg';
images[13] = 'images/stretch.jpg';
images[14] = 'images/stopracism.jpg';
images[15] = 'images/rustina.jpg';
images[16] = 'images/pooped.jpg';
images[17] = 'images/Pain.jpg';
images[18] = 'images/freak.jpg';
images[19] = 'images/Untitled.jpg';
images[20] = 'images/pillowfight.jpg';
images[21] = 'images/loopback.jpg';
images[22] = 'images/lemonparty.jpg';
images[23] = 'images/christmas.jpg';
images[24] = 'images/weightlifter.jpg';
images[25] = 'images/spin.gif';
-- SNIPPED SOME STUFF --
document.body.background = images[(Math.floor(curstep) % imagecount) + 1];
setTimeout("movew0w()", delay);
}
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
MySQL is grateful for all code contributions we get, and we will leave all contributions we receive under the GPL as GPL.
The idea is that when you contribute code, you get a better product in return, and everyone gets to see the code that you produced.
forge.mysql.com is a great starting place for contributors.
Marten
Companies losing billions of dollars in the market for breathing air.
"If only the government would pass stricter laws making air more proprietary and mandating more control over it, we wouldn't be losing so much money. Every time you take a breath without paying, a company worker's child goes starving." said Air Corp spokesperson Scrooge McMoneypants.
I hope I don't get modded funny, because laughing at a sad truth takes the force out of it. Citizens have no idea how much money they could be saving, aka are losing, aka are paying extra due to pro-corp laws, or the lack of anti-monopoly laws, but it's a staggering amount.
Promote true freedom - support standards and interoperability.
Post Office complains e-mail has caused losses of $168 billion from 1992 to 2008.
entropy happens
Open Source Software has brought 60 billion dollars in efficiency to the market.
The ______ Agenda
Now that is a pretty amazing achievement, and open source coders and the companies that support them should be congratulated.
That is a massive achievement, open source software it is already saving $60 billion dollars per year, imagine what will be achieved in five years time, savings of hundreds of billions of dollars per year. It would be virtually suicide for companies to stick with the millstone of closed source proprietary software and be stuck with the costs in the hundreds of billions of dollars.
Sometimes those knuckle heads just forget there are other companies besides M$ and M$'s profits are in reality other companies losses, let alone the 10 to 100 times hundreds factor of using their software even after you have paid for it (well it actually never stop paying for it until you finally crossgrade/upgrade to open source software and start making those billions of dollars of savings ;D).
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
You think that's bad? I'm losing billions on my potential canned air business. Damned trees.
While I agree with your sentiment, I think there are some important things still to consider.
Not all free software costs nothing.
I believe very strongly that free software is much more efficient to develop than non-free. However, I can't believe it is 100% efficient (i.e., it cost nothing to implement solutions using free software). The top end number I can pull out of my ass is about 90%.
Which means that free/open source software is saving $54 billion a year and there is a potential $6 billion free/open source software industry (adjust the numbers to accomodate whatever percentage you use).
Most likely a good proportion of that money is being spent on in-house development in large corporations making small changes to the software in order to create their solution. Talented entrepreneurs should be spending their time figuring out how to get a slice of this money, I would think...
That 60 Billion figure is all spin. And the most obvious counter spin to this fallacy is that FOSS didn't COST the industry 60 billions, it SAVED consumers and companies 60 billions. Which says a LOT about Microsoft's TCO and get the facts campaign I say...
But Oracle is a big FOSS user. And you surely heard about they want to support RH Linux.
What do you think, whom Oracle likes better? Windows or Linux?
Patents Drive Free Software as Hurricanes Drive Construction Industry
Nintendo's Wii console has roughly 80 MiB of RAM. How far would the RAM market have to go down for the Wii to fall below the $320 that it fetches on eBay? First, it would have to fall far enough to make it worth it for Nintendo to take five months to get a new factory online. But how much is that?
ObTopic: Internet Channel's about box has a bunch of copyright notices for permissively licensed free software. So I guess free software saves even Nintendo and Opera some money.
I think it would be great fun to do downtime comparisons of proprietary vs. Free & Open Source Software. Tech Support logs could tell us what company has called Amber Alert AntiVirus, Corp, how many times, and the support personnel's case notes would tell us about downtime. The man-months of labor to pore through all those data couldn't amount to more than $2B, so let's go do that, right now! What, the Big Software lobby isn't interested in knowing those facts? I just lost $1 Billion (my projected profits on that little counting project) to Microsoft. Congress should increase my immigrant quotas and the President should lower my taxes.
All 19 hijackers were known terrorists 09-10-2001. Lack of FBI intelligence does not justify warrantless wiretaps..
Subject says it all
I do agree with your central point, though. The so-called "lost income" of these firms is money in the pockets of those who otherwise would have bought their products. A few large losers and many (not all large) winners.
I still suspect, though, that you might own a copy of Atlas Shrugged with the pages stuck together.
Frankly, if the price is right [as in free, or cheap], why not go open?
Also open allows for projects that traditional developers would never touch.
If each mistake being made is a new one, then progress is being made.
Lets get some decent figures here. FOSS is a $US19 Billion per year, folks, (not just being made by the Americans). That's associated customisation, support, service, widget frosting, duplication, and sale of software. Would someone like ot explain to me where the other $41 Billion came from?
Did they estimate how much value proprietory vendors pillage in Open source projects for inclusion in their products ?
For instance, Windows (tm) includes the zlib library ; most firewall appliances ship with either Netfilter or BSD firewalls, etc...
And there are many many other examples... People claiming they write software from zero nowadays are nothing but big liars ?
Open Source saves customers 60 Billion /year!
If someone is passing you on the right, you are an asshole for driving in the wrong lane.
I think markets are a great tool for many purposes, but they can produce inefficient systems and can reward destructive behavior. We should be careful about subordinating our judgment to markets. They're a bit like computers: we should only trust them with problems that we know they solve reliably, and when they're obviously screwing up, we should rethink our trust. We shouldn't say, "Well blow me down, I never realized raping babies was a good thing until that guy got rich doing it," any more than we would say, "I guess I don't really need my data, because otherwise this program wouldn't keep deleting it."
I tried to read The Fountainhead in high school but couldn't bear to read more than a few dozen pages. It was like a mirror of my own ugly narcissism, and it made me feel dirty to read a celebration of something that I recognized as a personal limitation in myself. Later I managed to get through about half of Atlas Shrugged. Along with The Lord of the Rings (another book that encourages people to embrace their prejudices) I saw it as a necessary initiation into the tribe of narrow, nerdy, alienated white males, which seemed like the only tribe that would have me. I opted out, and now they're cool and getting all these cute pseudo-nerdy chicks :-(
Atlas Shrugged did do me one favor: it confirmed a theory about narcissism that I had developed based on my own personal case. If you only understand your own virtues and ideas, then by process of elimination, you logically attribute all good in the world to the virtues and ideas you possess. The solution to all problems in the world, then, is for everyone to appreciate your virtues and to allow every question to be decided according to your ideas. Atlas Shrugged is Ayn Rand's personal thousand-page exploration of her narcissism. Civilization collapses without her virtues; utopia results from the pure practice of them. A very neat fit to my theory, which made me feel very smart -- I'm sure that's all there is to it ;-)