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Economic Crisis Will Eliminate Open Source
An anonymous reader writes "The economic crisis will ultimately eliminate open source projects and the 'Web 2.0 free economy,' says Andrew Keen, author of The Cult of the Amateur. Along with the economic downturn and record job loss, he says, we will see the elimination of projects including Wikipedia, CNN's iReport, and much of the blogosphere. Instead of users offering their services 'for free,' he says, we're about to see a 'sharp cultural shift in our attitude toward the economic value of our labor' and a rise of online media businesses that reward their contributors with cash. Companies that will survive, he says, include Hulu, iTunes, and Mahalo. 'The hungry and cold unemployed masses aren't going to continue giving away their intellectual labor on the Internet in the speculative hope that they might get some "back end" revenue,' says Keen."
Advertising + Blogs = continuance of our current model.
Can someone please mod this story as flame bait?
wud
The end of the dot-com bubble killed linux, stifled production of php sites, and made people stop sending non-commercial email. Those things all went away, right?
All you may see is a shakeout of commercial Web 2.0 ventures that were going nowhere and were only being made a fuss of "because it's web 2.0". The same hype that drove the original dotcom bubble. A shakeout of dodgy commercial ventures, yes, Opensource on the other hand is likely to get stronger in this climate.
They aren't the people contributing. The guy is an 1d.10T
If I had an Ass, I'd call it Fanny Bottom, then I could slap my Ass; Fanny Bottom, on the Arse.
A lot of projects accept them..
Say something ridiculous, market your own book.
Some people really don't understand the purpose of open source. (Hint: It's not to earn 'back end' revenue.)
Since when is user delivered content driven by hopes of profit? These people are driven by wanting their voices heard and to some extent wanting to be known. If these sites fail, it will be because the site itself isn't profitable, not because their users, who they could care less about, aren't making money off it.
Whale
Current Slashdot fortune: "try again"
Wait...I thought the Economic Crisis was GOOD for open source?
http://linux.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/10/21/0116221
Funny, I just passed by some article someplace saying the exact opposite. mmm where was that?
I'm guessing the published ..blablablabl horsecrap
has never coded ..amature
Darwin Enforcement Agent
Just like we saw all those failures from the Y2K problem, right?
Open Source has its' place in the industry today, and I don't think that the current state of the economy will cause that to go away. There may be a downturn, but the industry as a WHOLE will experience that, until the economy rebounds.
Attention all planets of the Solar Federation! We have assumed control! - Neil Peart
This guy is under the assumption everyone who works on open source technology is after financial gain. Very short sighted
Blogs shift power from broadcasters to individuals. Pull media empowers us all.
Stupid.
Genesis 1:32 And God typed
This is nothing but a re-hash of Bill Gates' screed against the Homebrew Computer Club about how good software will never be created without paid programmers. It was wrong in then, and it's still wrong.
It's like internet porn, some shops will have enough quality to attract direct paying customers who have more time than money, the rest will give their product away for free and pay for it with advertising. The barriers to entry are low enough that every joe schmo out of work can try their hand at the game so a bad economy will actually lead to MORE people throwing "free" content out there with the hope of hitting it big.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
Surely with more people sitting at home, unemployed, with nothing to do other than look for a job, and desperate to make their cv stand out more than everyone else in there situation, the amount of speculative work produced may in fact rise?
What a load of bollocks.
you had me at #!
Does this guy really thinks everyone has a website/blog/whatever only to make money?
My personal website doesn't have any banner, I have to pay for hosting from my own pockets (and I haven't updated the damn thing in months either).
I think this is only a counter-strike against this.
No, the hungry and cold unemployed IT guys will invest their time into open source projects, because it 's a good way to keep their curriculum in shape. And the hungry and cold unemployed will keep using linkedin and facebook to extend their network inorde to find a job. And ofcourse, businesses in difficulties will stop throwing money away for overrated software when they can get a free and open equivalent.
I think a crisis will definately have a positive impact on open source and web 2.0
- Never underestimate the power of human stupidity.
He completely discounts those who do it for the love and there are too many developers out there whose idea of kicking back is to fire up a laptop and get stuck in to a project that interests them. Yes people should be more aware of the cost of their labour and not be taken for a ride as so many seem to, but to say that open source is simple going to curl up and die is just plain wrong.
Slashdot needs to pay me for this post! That will be $500 please.
On the contrary, out-of-work software engineers will have some spare time on their hands. CSci grads facing a tough job market will be interested in building a portfolio for their first job interviews. What better way than to start or participate in an open source effort? It's a neighborly thing to do. When times are tough, generosity is on the rise -- rather than decline. We've helped our neighbors with various things and vice-versa.
No data to back up his points. No historical parallels to compare previous economic down-turns to any loss of volunteer-type work. In short, a terrible, speculative article with no facts or reasoning behind it. You could write an equally persuading case in the other direction simply by asserting all your key points in the way the author did.
Terrible article. Shouldn't have been posted.
I don't expect anything from a lot of the free project I do. I don't do them to make money in any way whatsoever.
Or not. I'm sure there will be some casualties (there always are), but I don't think that this is the end of the (FOSS) world as we know it. You gotta love the Chicken Littles, though.
'Loose' is when your pants are three sizes too big. 'Lose' is when you misuse 'loose'.
So what's Keen going to write about when all of his favorite non-commerce-driven targets are "eliminated?"
Yep, the first thing I thought to my self when the housing bubble burst and the stock market crashed was "Well that's it, no more writing opensource software for me!".
Yea right! Some companies will quit contributing. Those that were doing it just to make a buck. Folks who do it because they feal it's the right thing to do will continue on through thick and thin.
-- Many men would appreciate a woman's mind more if they could fondle it
It is difficult for a businessman to believe that someone can work for anything other than money :)
Religion: The greatest weapon of mass destruction of all time
LET THEM BE
Every time an idiot says something that is not going to affect you directly, let it be!
Trust me, do you really wanna do business with people who believe this?? Do you want to be an employee who believe these things?
But guess what, you're right and they're wrong!
If my employer has a stupid idea, I either recommend against (and they usually listen) or I quit or I shut up.
If my competitor has a stupid idea, I just say "GREAT!!! GO AHEAD!!"
how long until
I mean, just yesterday this whole debacle was going to be good for open source and today it damns it. http://linux.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/10/21/0116221
Most economic down turns spawn innovation. People no longer have nice cushy jobs soaking up their days. These people no longer have anything to lose (their job) by trying that great idea to build a better mouse trap. Some of them invent things really cool and successful.
Linux exists because Linus couldn't afford a real unix server, for example.
If the downturn turns into a depression, then no one will have money to pay anyone for services anyway. So the huddled masses will probably be bartering their services and still contribute to open source, because its the cheapest way for them to get the tools they need.
Take some money and buy a clue.
Think Deeply.
He makes the same fatal mistake that nearly all economists make when talking about labor. They assume that labor in and of itself has value. It doesn't. Only the products of the labor have value, and then only if someone is willing to value it.
Your labor is worthless if you work on something that no one values.
Sure, it would be nice if we could all be compensated for all of our labor all the time, but the real economy doesn't work that way. It only works that way in the wet dreams of Marxist economists.
Just be sure to wear the gold uniform when you beam down -- you know what happens when you wear the red one.
And every web site will be transformed into money making porn sites.
I'd comment but I'm too busy starving to death. The well dried up and my cattle were eaten by lions. Also, my interests were carried away by malnourished natives so I definitely won't be doing anything outside of work, and certainly not for free.
Its a recession, not the feckin apocalypse.
Article is useless, since most open-source projects start as someone's hobby, and are contributed to by others coding as their hobby.
I realize that the quick-buck is all the rage these days, but the fact is that not everything is done for money. Some things are done for fun. Some are done because of a sense of duty to "give back" to society in some manner.
Hi, Andrew! I know you're new to this and don't really understand these complicated ideas very well, but I'll try to help you.
My company has a program written in FoxPro. For reasons too long to explain, it's not going away any time soon. We needed a way to run queries against that data, and because FoxPro is too slow for interactive use, we decided to move that data into PostgreSQL. We looked and looked but there just wasn't a good program for regularly copying that data from one to the other on a scheduled basis. Eventually, I wrote one.
Now, my company isn't in the FoxPro-to-PostgreSQL conversion business. We have other, more interesting things to do all day than sell or support software. My boss, being enlightened, allowed me to release the program as Free Software so that other people could use it. It cost him absolutely nothing over what he'd already paid me to write the program. Since that first release, I've heard from users around the world who liked it and wanted new features or to make suggestions. Some of those features and suggestions turned out to be pretty good ideas for us, too, so I added them to the program.
My boss is happy because we really needed that program to conduct our business. I'm happy because I got to share a nice bit of code with the world. Random users everywhere are happy because they can spend their money on writing other cool programs and food and televisions instead of buying my program's commercial equivalent (if there was one). My boss got something nice, I got money to pay my mortgage, and everybody wins.
See, Andrew? It's not that hard! But please leave the big concepts to the adults until you get a little more practice, OK? Good boy.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
Most large businesses are just as dumb as government organisations - you just don't get to hear about most of it.
Guys like this don't understand that you cannot beat zealots. And I am using that word to not mean a negative thing. Someone who truly believes that open source is the way and gets something from it will not be turned to only build souless projects for a buck. No matter how many of these articles they pump out or how many chairs are thrown.
If anything, OpenSource may be the very thing that helps to get us going again! Especially if there is no money to pay for software. The OSS itself is like gold if you know how to use it and leverage it.
But we'll always have our doomsayers. Reminds me of the "Decline and Fall of the American Programmer" book written a while back -- which turned out not to be the case, which then the author wrote a follow up -- "The Rise and Resurrection of the American Programmer".
One only gets away with bad prognostications by hoping no one remembers them when they are proven wrong. Bad assumption to make in this day and age of the archived and cached Internet.
Ruby Neural Evolution of Augmenting Topologies
Perhaps the economic crisis might push people and companies to search for less expensive options...like open source products.
His whole premise is deeply flawed. People don't post stuff on these sites because they are so fat and happy that they just can't find anything better to do with their time. They do it because they want to be known for something, or they want to show off, or because they just want to contribute to a large project. None of these things are really affected by the economy.
Okay, some people might contribute less because they have to take 2 jobs or something, but that's a temporary phenomenon. For most people, their jobs will still occupy about 8 hours a day, and that still leaves several hours every day for farting around on the Internet, which often includes submitting content to these so-called "Open Source" content sites.
User-generated content was there at the beginning of the Web, and it isn't going anywhere anytime soon. Maybe CNN will toss the iReport thing, but not because of the economic downturn. Sure, they might decide that now is a good time to end it because they have a convenient excuse, but the real reason to end it is because it's a cesspool of mouth breathers posting pictures of their cats and saying the same kind of mindless garbage that gets posted to CNN's Political Ticker. The iReport site doesn't do much more than allow CNN to post stories that would be of no more than local interest otherwise (ooh, a car on fire! Alert the media!).
As for Wikipedia, it has deep and fundamental flaws that may or may not eventually lead to its downfall, but the economic condition isn't going to change that one way or the other.
The last downturn I changed countries and was unemployed. Guess what i worked on to keep my skills up? That's right, Open source projects. I became active in several Open source projects, much more than I am today as now my employer doesn't give me the time to focus like I did back then. This article is sadly mistaken.
The "Masses" have never been the passionate ones to drive open source.
Because open source has never weathered economic downturns before...
Right?
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
This guy is trolling. Open Source does not mean free. His article only suggests he is not familiar with the sites who's doom he is predicting.
> "The hungry and cold unemployed masses aren't going to continue giving away their intellectual
> labor on the Internet in the speculative hope that they might get some 'back end' revenue,"
Yeah, right! As the author of a dozen OSS projects, I can tell you right away that I did not "give them away in the speculative hope that they might get some back end revenue". I haven't made a cent on them, didn't plan to, and am not going to in the future. I'm not selling them because nobody would pay anything for them. I wrote them for my personal benefit, and open-sourced them because I had no reason not to. Perhaps someday someone will make something useful out of them, and make money from them, but I'm not holding my breath. In the meantime, it costs me nothing to publish them, so I do. The depression will not change this. It may give people less free time to work on OSS, but that doesn't mean it's going away.
If our economic output went flat tomorrow, Linux would still do just as good as it always has. In fact, it may do even better, as the people who are currently paying $50/year/machine for Windows licenses suddenly can't afford to pay squat.
You would have to be a complete troll to believe that the catalyst behind open source is somehow intrinsically economical and not some fucked up blend of economical and fundamentalist. The majority of the "unknown" hackers are simply students, hobbyists and loyalists who want to put their name on something and to use their machines how they want to, and not how some corporation tells them they can. No economic crisis will ever be deep enough to make some people seek intelligence, no economic crisis will stop thinkers from thinking, no economic crisis will stop dreamers from dreaming.
So yeah, Open Source may get hit. But while other businesses are closing up shop, there will always be someone, somewhere, too obsessive, too creative and too egotistical to stop coding for his/her pet project. And that will keep Open Source alive through any economic crisis.
I would argue that many developers will contribute to open source to be more competitive in the job market. In particular, I imagine we will see many young developers in college or shortly after working on open source projects to bolster that hard to achieve early experience.
If people are on economic hardtimes... why would they ditch a free service for a pay service? Someone doens't know crap about economics or human nature.
Seems to me like open and free software managed pretty well in previous downturns. Why should this one be any different?
/ The Arrow
"How lovely you are. So lovely in my straightjacket..." - Nny
Dam kids with their new names and the compressed bitmaps. Back in the day all I needed was regex to find porn.
If Andrew Keen said the sun will rise tomorrow, and winter will be followed by spring, and the sky is blue and water is wet, I'd have serious doubts about those things. Or I'd assume he has yet another crackpot theory book out and he's promoting it. The guy's been predicting the death of Wikipedia and OSS for years now.
And wasn't there just an article the other day about how this crisis is GOOD for OSS?
In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is kinky.
If IT professionals get laid off, they will probably along with looking for another job do open source work.
Everyone hopes they will get a job offer soon, but apart from being interesting and giving you something to do working on OSS could be beneficial if it takes a while to get another job.
If you have two candidates who have been out of work for several months and one says that he has worked on open source, and has some "thank you"s and testimonials you are going to know that he kept sharp.
The hungry and cold unemployed masses aren't going to continue giving away their intellectual labor on the Internet in the speculative hope that they might get some 'back end' revenue," says Keen.
Cash strapped consumers aren't going to want to pay for services they don't need.
When I read stories like this, or like the "RAID-5 will die next year" article earlier today, I feel like I'm in the wrong job. I mean, I could shoot my mouth off, spouting stupid things that almost make sense if you don't scratch the surface too hard.
People who get paid to write/create online may find that jobs (and payment) are scarcer, but people who provide volunteer time (wikipedia, etc.) aren't going to suddenly stop doing it because they're unemployed. In fact, some of them are probably going to have more time on their hands.
I predict that there will be an increase in online suicide notes in the next three years, and also that everyone will point to the internet as the problem instead of recognising it as a time-sink for the already suicidally depressed. Unfortunately, I don't have any specious facts to bolster my opinion (which of course, I'd angrily claim to be inevitable and obvious to anyone but the most clueless), so I guess I'll never be on Fox News, write for Fast Company, or blog (for pay!) on Internet Evolution.
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
No doubt when the upturn arrives, we'll see all these arguments rolled out again, for whatever self-serving purpose they support.
In the mean time it gives some unknowns their 5 minutes in the spotlight.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
It'll be harder to argue for expensive new Oracle, SAP and similar licenses. Oh sure, that database that's just a large bit bucket will cost your business a few hundred thousand dollars to implement! Just lay off a worker or two to fit it into your budget.
Bullshit.
If anything, it'll be easier now to justify using OSS because the ridiculous cost of most enterprise software will become more apparent to the customers. I predict that if this continues, you'll see more companies forced to use OSS out of necessity simply because they cannot justify buying the extremely expensive licenses for proprietary software.
On a related note, Keen is one of those guys who laments the loss of our "high culture." The dude is a day late and a dollar short in his whole analysis. Western high culture started taking a nose dive 100 years ago with the rise of political populism. If anything will help to bring it back, it'll be putting better, cheaper tools into the hands of content producers so that they can do more work with less effort.
Andrew Keen is a bitter, jealous academic and a failed entrepreneur. He has no credibility, because he has never created anything of value. I mean, for Gods' sake, he even looks the health inspector from Ghostbusters! Yes, it is true...
If you don't pay attention to Andrew Keen, he just goes away.
Just don't look. Just don't look.
Author is wrong; article is wrong. Nothing to see here.
Those who fail to understand communication protocols, are doomed to repeat them over port 80.
Statistically speaking, the world doesn't end all that often.
^^ The title of the next article..
Clearly set before this audience to get a reaction.
Besides, when I was unemployed, I had nothing to do but:
The unemployed have LOTS of time on their hands, and open source is one way to do something productive that may lead to some direct income, or at the very least demonstrate your skills to prospective employers.
I certainly would hire someone who could point to a dozen intelligently edited Wikipedia articles that they contributed to over another candidate who has nothing to show for their last 6 months.
"Being paid to work is intuitive to the human condition; it represents our most elemental sense of justice."
Justice would be if this moron joined the ranks of the unemployed.
But not because of internet becoming pay only. I think small donations, for projects like Wikipedia, or sites you like, may spur it. I just hope paypal doesn't ride this as I hate paypal with a passion. Micropayments would have to be a structure where only a few percent get taken away, not the current credit card structure of $0.35 per transaction plus 1-2% which translated to 35% or more for $1.00 purchases.
I would like micropayments for things like flash games or others - not to provide make the flash games that are given away for free suddenly pay-for, but to spurn development of BETTER games. A lot of flash games now are either free or expensive ($10) for what I consider it's niche and probably could make many more sales at a lower price (bell curve). Kind of like iTunes $0.99 pricing.
Micropayments would be nice for e-books and other things to suck authors in with a viable scheme while epaper starts to take off.
FTA:
"a rise of online media businesses that reward their contributors with cash."
Yes, but financed by commercials, it will be more of a profit sharing venture.
"the elimination of projects including Wikipedia, CNN's iReport, and much of the blogosphere"
how come this hasn't been tagged with "and nothing of value was lost"....
Exactly the opposite will happen. There will be more open source because the 'poor starving masses' with software development skills will have nothing else to do.
What will change will be the emphasis upon which open source will be focused. There will be less development on games and DRM bypassing and more on programs that connect people together for economic development. More CraigsList-type of development and less BitTorrent.
There will be a lot of development on software that builds groups with common economic interests that are separated by great distances. Things that corporations almost exclusively do now, such as buying and delivering groceries from distant farms or cereal processing factories.
In severe economic times, people will be less not more inclined to allow their labor to be diverted into the generation of corporate profit. The concept that software workers will be giving more time to well-paying jobs assumes that are actually going to be well-paying jobs for software workers. In a severe recession or Soviet-style economic collapse, that simply won't be the case.
Is $0.00 really the future of labor in an age of mass unemployment?
Depends on the depth of unemployment. For one thing, Zero is Slave Wages, and people will sell themselves into slavery long before they starve, so yes, one could make a case for Zero Wages as the future of labour. A depressing and dystopian vision of future labour, not one without precedent.
For another - if you're dealing with people who have no money, they will sell their computer and cut their internet off before they starve, making the whole point completely moot.
He then blathered on:
One of the very few positive consequences of the current financial miasma will be a sharp cultural shift in our attitude toward the economic value of our labor. Mass unemployment and a deep economic recession comprise the most effective antidote to the utopian ideals of open-source radicals.
OR, as economic problems tighten, corporations will go to Open source solutions due to their low costs, and they will advocate a collective shared effort in order to develop a software resource "commons" that everyone can leverage to their own advantage.
His position is deeply flawed. If money is tight, not only will companies seek cheap or free solutions, individuals who are far less capitalised will do much the same. Also, if money is so tight that blog based news suffers THIS DOES NOT MEAN that there will be some magical investment in paid journalism.
I humbly submit that Keen is a Troll, and he spews this nonsense just to get noticed and get his page count up.
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
Heard an interview of this guy on the radio, actually. He spent most of the time waxing on about how all these "non-professional" people are creating content, and how that's a bad thing. He was arguing that only people with proper training and credentials should be allowed to produce and publish content. Of course he himself is the absolute arbiter of what makes someone "qualified" or "trained," which is of course ridiculous.
History is full of self-trained, self-taught, self-made geniuses and creatives. It's also full of blithering idiots, both with and without little pieces of paper with a school's name and a dean's signature stamped on them. Allowing (and encouraging) open publishing for the masses does nothing to reduce the value of good works. If anything, it allows for more good works to be created by people who otherwise may not have found out they had a talent for such things.
On the other hand, restricting the ability to publish to a select few "accredited" individuals will do nothing to improve the quality of works available, and if anything will lead to the protection and promotion of low-quality works as "professional"...
I mean, hell, how hard is it to get a Liberal Arts degree? I got a minor in humanities on accident... :P
Maxim: People cannot follow directions.
Increases in truth directly with the length of time spent explaining them
Not to mention all the time farting around on the internet at work...
Yes I am. -- See?
That's wishful thinking!
"Ah yes, and the companies that I predict to survive happen to be the same ones I got stock on. Whoops, did I say that aloud?"
And here is my prediction for the next 300 years of economy: McDonald's, Microsoft and Slashdot Enterprises will eventually perish, "paniq Industries" will survive them all.
Do not trust this signature.
Agree with all the troll comments. Last time it happened to me, being unemployed seemed to give me lots of free time to do unpaid work, as well as a desire to find something to motivate me.
I'm sure this will be said to death by the time this post closes for comments, and while this analysis might have merit when done from the viewpoint of someone 'valuing their own labor', the same way donations to charity dry up during hard economic times, that analysis does not apply for several reasons:
1) Something that has been open sourced is perpetually in the open source marketplace. Often called the 'viral nature of the GPL', an economic downturn cannot take away, say, MySQL or JBoss. Both are here, and are here to stay. His argument could be taken to mean innovation may stop temporarily, and I'd entertain that notion.
2) Companies seeking ways to control their costs will EMBRACE open source, so its use will INCREASE. If a CEO is facing a choice between his cushy salary or a license for WebLogic or Oracle, He will choose his salary and tell his IT department to find alternatives. they will, n JBoss and MySql.
3) Training budgets will shrink. So if you can learn everything you need to know to write Rails apps from sources like http://www.railscasts.com/ you are going to build your next app in Rails, as opposed to ColdFusion (and if you have never heard of Cold Fusion, that proves my point - PHP and Java pretty much killed it during the dot-bomb ays).
4) Tech jobs will dry up - and the cream of the crop will need to distinguish themselves. I have heard Dave Thomas (PragDave) say on several occasions that our industry would be better off if we fired the bottom half of developers. This economic downturn may see that happen, and the top half will need to distinguish themselves. the currency of this kingdom is knowledge, and the way we demonstrate this knowledge is by sharing it with others... So I expect to see an INCREASE in blogs, contributions to open source as resume building, etc.
I could go on and on - for instance, people seeking free training will go to more user group meetings... people seeking to network for job opportunities will go to more user group meetings - people seeking to distinguish themselves will want to PRESENT at said user group meetings.
As I said in a post a few months ago, I am seeing an INCREASE in the aount of work I'm doing... why? I develop and I train on open source technologies and agile development methodologies... it is all about doing more with less.
Don't just survive - THRIVE during this downturn. I'll see the best of you on the other side of this downturn, still here reading slashdot, still climbing the skills mountain.
I can say for sure that he doesn't "get it". While he does make several good points about the advantages of payed work, it seems that he is ignorant about the advantages of free contribution, and the way OSS uses a blend paid and unpaid work to advance projects.
He also doesn't seem to understand that the large companies that are supporting OSS are not doing it out of the goodness of their hearts, they are doing it to try to disrupt other businesses.
In short, the man is not a troll, but he has no idea what he is talking about. Move along.
These people are driven by wanting their voices heard and to some extent wanting to be known
Groupies! Man! I see those F/OSS programmers surrounded by chicks! And I mean hot chicks - lot's of 'em! Here I am, thinking playing guitar would get me chicks. Nope! That's so last generation! Nope! It's technology that gets 'em! Hell! Just look at all the babes Stallman has following him around!
F/OSS will get you laid!
The man is a fucking moron, quite simply. We're all going to stop doing things we did for no financial gain? So, why did we do them for no financial gain previously?
He assumes that people's only motivation is direct financial reward. That people don't just update Wikipedia pages because something's irritating to them, that people don't just put photos on Flickr because they want to be more social. People will never take an iPod apart, wire it up to their SNES just because they are curious.
The fact is that people do things for all sorts of reasons. Financial (direct or indirect), social, psychological. I once built a bit of open source code to tell me about the traffic on a road I used. There was no sensible way to make money from it, so I gave it away.
As a european citizen, I beg to differ. Euro? Maybe. Snob? Definitely. But both aren't connected just because they may have appeared together in this instance. Please keep that in mind.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Okay, this guy knows what he's talking about.
Or the summary is badly written.
No matter what, he's so dead wrong, infact it most probably is the other way round:
People without jobs have much more free time to spend on hobbies (as in coding), and people with less money are in need of open source software much more (as in demand and usage of the resulting software).
Open Source is not about giving things away for free, its about giving people the opporuntity to see the code, and use the code how you want. Free "as in beer" is simply an by-product of the core freedom.
This guy clearly does not understand that concept. Developers are often paid for OS projects, while many many others are compensated in other ways.
Money certainly motivates a lot of people, but so does other things like boredom, fame, compassion, jeolousy, generosity, whatever... Different strokes for differnet folks. My point is that money is rarely a motivator even in the worse of times.
My gut tells me that OS development will thrive in this time as out-of-work developers have free time to work on pet projects or work on improvements that can be added to a resume. Struggling small business (and some large ones) will be more open to trying OS software. And through companies like ASUS even consumers are going to be motivated to try low cost OS based alternatives to "main stream" computers.
If you are reading this, you owe me ten cents per word. I can no longer afford to give away my valuable insights on slashdot free of charge.
Without reading any responses, lemme see if I get this straight.
- Economy tanks
- No money
- Open Source is ditched in favor of spending money
- Free services will fail in favor of PAYING for the same thing, only different.
- NO PROFIT!!!
Sorry, but in a down economy, I expect more open source development;
- Ditch the expensive IDE in favor of something free, like Open Source.
- Take a long hard look at deploying the project in Open Source instead of buying that expensive software
- Profit!
Uh, down economies are the meat of Open Source adoption. Remember the Web 1.0 bubble? When it burst, those projects went FOSS. Actually, they started FOSS, and when the money dried up, free still worked.
Gee, there might be something to this stuff after all.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
This guy seems to believe that US of A are the internet. The rest of the world isn't enjoying a recession of that magnitude and, therefore, will not take such a blow. Even if his theories were true, they apply only to the american market.
Do not trust this signature.
...i disagree with this guy. and i also disagree with any person that agrees with him.
but here's what will happen: apple will continue to charge +60% on their products, the general mass of people will continue to use pirated copies of microsoft products, and linux will still be developed largely by volunteers.
wow.
thanks for the warning though.
+1 Statistically speaking, the world doesn't end all that often.
When, in 50 years time, the definitive histories of the Web 2.0 epoch are written, historians will look back at Andrew Keen, Silicon Valley author, broadcaster, and entrepreneur with a mixture of incredulity and amusement.
There. Fixed that for ya...
[signature]
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Our world's economic system is about to go through some large-scale changes. On that there's broad agreement. About as broad as the previous agreement that home prices could go up forever. But let's accept for argument that this prediction could be right.
One way to go would be back to the Middle Ages. Rich people could hire private armies - we've got the rich people and the private armies in place for this. They could employ serfs who work for credit rather than cash - the banking system having been left to collapse. This is basically the libertarian dream - every propertied man or woman for him- or herself. In this case we can expect to see treaties between the principalities in which property rights to software - as to everything else - are absolute. This would be consonant with the dream of the writer here.
There are many other roads available, though, based on equality and freedom rather than wealth and serfdom. We don't have such good models for these roads - obviously the Marxist schemes suck. But there's one particularly bright spot, a product of social evolution rather than someone's unworkable academic scheme: open source itself.
No wonder than that this guy directly attacks open source. We're on the central front of the war for the future.
"with their freedom lost all virtue lose" - Milton
Since this whole credit crisis started, my favorite hobby, gaming, has become way too expensive. Because of this, I started looking at other, cheaper hobbies to keep me busy. Starting my own little OSS project was what I chose. So, in my case, this credit crisis actually had the reverse effect.
The economic crisis we're going through will help open source, not hurt it. The first thing large companies will look at when attempting to "tighten the belt" so to speak, is Microsoft's licensing schemes. They'll seek out alternatives and will actually see how much savings moving away from MS will help them. I realize he was speaking about things like Wikipedia, but what I said is still relevant just replace MS with whatever large corporation you want...
It never ceases to amaze me how some people will blow their entire credibility all for the sake of a few bucks.
Here's a hint to the author, Andrew Keen. People will respect you more, and value your opinion, when you're not trolling for dollars.
That usually leads to greater wealth and respect. Much more than you can obtain by trolling.
OSS is a developement model, not a business model. Please bring your brain along to the discussion table the next time. Thank you.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Dream on, dream on, dream on.
Maybe tomorrow the good Lord will take you away.
This reasoning makes about as much sense as saying that the recession will cause wanna-be novelists to stop writing. Nothing will stop them writing, and nothing will stop hackers hacking (except maybe a power outage).
I piss off bigots.
We had the same silly stories when he did that Cult of the Amateur thing, now he's at it again with more flamebait. Why even post stories like this?
"For all of us, there comes a time on any given day, week, and month,every year and in different degrees over our lifetimes, when we choose to act in some way that is oriented toward fulfilling our social and
psychological needs, not our market-exchangeable needs. It is that part of our lives and our motivational structure that social production taps, and on which it thrives. There is nothing mysterious about this. It is evident to any of us who rush home to our family or to a restaurant or bar with friends at the end of a workday, rather than staying on for another hour of overtime or to increase our billable hours; or at least
regret it when we cannot." --Benkler, _Wealth of Networks_
"Human beings are, and always have been, diversely motivated beings. We act instrumentally, but also noninstrumentally. We act for material gain, but also for psychological well-being and gratification, and for social connectedness. There is nothing new or earth-shattering about this, except perhaps to some economists. " -- Benkler, _Wealth of Networks_
Returned Peace Corps IT Volunteer
I have been working in IT for 15 years now. I am one of the "Linux" generation, and am proud to support FOSS software development efforts - whether by cash donations, or giving time.
However, over the past several years, I have seen several instances of why FOSS is eroding the value of our (consultants/software engineers) labour.
I have been called into a couple of projects, which were initiated by outsourcing the labour overseas. The projects started off very well - the sales honeymoon phase. However, as they progressed, it was noted that the development was not happening on-schedule, and was starting to deviate from the requirements. The requirements had to be adjusted, because they deemed to be "too ambitious."
After some thorough analysis (as a 3rd party), I had noticed the same trend: poor software engineering skills at work. The people writing the software, suffered from:
- a lack of understanding of underlying software systems
- a lack of understanding of the big picture
- a lack of skill in the chosen language (sections of code were blatantly copied from several FOSS projects, without indicating to the client that this was done - but comments were kept in the code for developers' ease)
- a lack of understanding on how to solve problems without brute-force (yes, throwing more CPU and memory at it will work for now... however...)
In both cases, the overseas teams were eventually abandoned, and the development was brought in-house. There was definitely an increase in cost, but the projects were finished to the original specs.
Why did I just mention these? I see a blatant abuse of FOSS in the wild. It all comes down to dollars per unit time. If you, as a FOSS developer are donating time to a project, your value is $0 (no revenue, divided by a significant time investment).
However, the people that take parts of FOSS code, and use in their own product which they retail, not only get some $$$$, but their value increases, since they don't have to spend as much time writing code (FOSS code goes here!).
It is time to wake up and smell the bits: we all would like to contribute to something bigger. I understand the desire to give something away which I made, for free, to "help the cause." However, it's coming back and biting us in the ass.
Giving away free IP so that it can be re-sold for a profit is becoming a huge problem.
Yes, I have read the Cathedral and the Bazaar. When I was young, and did not fully understand the economic underpinnings of business, I always pushed for the Bazaar. However, as I mature and notice how much value there is in people's work, the Cathedral seems to be way to go.
A question for each one of us: when the economy slumps, and it will, if you lose your job, how will you support yourself? Will FOSS put bread on your table, pay your rent and allow your kids to get clothed?
Ask yourself: how much am I worth?
Well, I certainly seem to know the name of one author, who won't be giving his "hard" labour away for free. Just too bad that it actually sells to extrapolate from oneself...
"The number you have dialed is imaginary. Please rotate your phone 90 degrees and try again."
"The hungry and cold unemployed masses aren't going to continue giving away their intellectual labor on the Internet in the speculative hope that they might get some 'back end' revenue," says Keen."
Most of the 'intellectual labor' that is out there, isn't worth the electricity used to post and store it.
I see a greater shift to manual labor, where "green" jobs rule. Recycling sorter, landscaper, etc. Real skills for real labor.
I am a computer consultant and part time entrepreneur. I am periodically contracting or starting a business. I haven't hit it "BIG" yet, but maybe someday.
I live and die by open source. My services and ventures are dependent on the environment that is available for free. That's why when I need to make improvements to the core projects I use, I contribute back to them. I don't look upon my work as "done for free" but as "done for me."
Contributing back? well, that's just good business. (1) it gives me some sales/expert cred when I say "I contribute to these projects." (2) When I contribute to the projects, my code gets great peer review and gets maintained. (3) On a personal note, it is the right thing to do.
IMHO the economy will SERIOUSLY hurt the proprietary vendors most. When cash is flowing, bottom lines rise with the tide. When times are tight, it becomes harder to justify expensive alternative.
What bunk!! A couple of years ago, when I was an unemployed douche-pail [You're STILL a douche-pail! - Ed.], I contributed tons of work online, was involved in many forums and conceived of and created all sorts of GPL'd works. I did a lot of proselytizing through my local LUG (Linux User Group). I pitch open source software to school boards and set others up with it. All of this was because I had time on my hands and wanted to feel as though I was a contributing member of society. I think the only part of the argument that might hold water would be that some unfortunate souls will not be able to afford basic internet connectivity - hence limiting their ability to contribute.
*** Don't be dull.***
"it will mean the success of Knol over Wikipedia, Mahalo over Google ... Hulu over YouTube Inc. , "
Seriously, WTF are Knol, Mahalo and Hulu?!?
Go get 'em, boy !!
He is dead wrong. What else is there to say. During periods when I was between jobs I contributed more to Open Source projects then I do now. I had the time then. Now with a real job I don't do so much.
We is also dead wrong when it talks about free web services as "open source". It's not the same thing and the free service might not even be running with free software.
What he does not know,it seems is that many of these people who wite the free software do it because they like to. Some people like to go fishing. Do they do it because they want a fish? Same here these software developers just like to develop software. Yes I know it is hard to understand if you are just some hack writing banging out text to make ends meet and hating every minute of it.
Because of the world-wide recession, the English Language will no longer be accepting new words. A spokesman was quoted as saying, "People no longer have the incentive to coin new words, except in cases where employers are willing to pay them to do so." The last official word offered prior to the freeze was "Halgivmas" which is, of course, the extended holiday period the first sighting of Halloween items in stores and on through to the end of the year, freely offered to posterity by Alice Van Housen of Algonquin, IL.
Say hello to my little sig.
apparently he isnt aware that any piece of open source work that is recognized brings huge recognition for its coder, and leave aside what prestige and job offers this brings, many open source project creators eventually become busy creating paid mods for users with specific needs upon request.
eventually some of such open source codes develop so much that they create an expertise and employment area of their own, like oscommerce. go to elance, type oscommerce, select projects and search. you can find even phpbb mod requests, a lot of wordpress, joomla, go figure. businesses and individual entrepreneurs using such solutions cant wait for the community to incorporate their requests into the base code. (that would overinflate the code base anyway). they pay, they get their installation modified. you cant believe the kind and size of some modifications that is requested for oscommerce for example.
it aint as simple as this guy talks. many of guys like these are top level guys, living on the frontier and top levels of i.t.. therefore they think corporate market is everything. hoewer, in people's level, in small businesses level, the business is going on as usual despite the crisis.
Read radical news here
Read TFA - this article is about unpaid contributions a la the Tim O'Reilly definition of Web 2.0 level 3. This guy's talking about contributions to communities like Youtube, Wikipedia, etc. He doesn't once mention any of the significant FOSS projects. He's talking about mass contributions. And maybe he's right in that respect, although given the number of folks who made their own payday by giving away their efforts initially, one would think he's more than a little out to lunch on that score as well.
Meanwhile, the FOSS movement can sidestep everything he's talking about for exactly the reasons that everyone here is espousing - the people who contribute to those projects are passionate about the work and tend to gain (in the long run, at least) as much from the effort as they could expect were they to sell their skills on the open market.
This guy is so wrong I have to laugh. All I can say is this guy should change professions, as he obvioulsy does not understand anything about the market he is pretending to write about.
With more time on our hands by not working don't you think we might just hack some new code to pass the time? I have so many ideas that I just can't find the time to do anything because my "research" at work demands all my time. The more time I have available away from work the more OS bugs I can fix and new algorithms and programs I can write and share.
The guy's picture has kind of a Rick Astley vibe.
Game... blouses.
You can't explain it to them.
They genuinely don't understand how someone can work on something for free.
Not everyone is working for some vague future payment. Those that are, will go away, but that won't mean the end of things like wikipedia.
this Andrew Keen to write TFA?
If not, why is he giving away his intellectual labor for free?
If yes... please stop! Let him join the hungry and cold unemployed masses!
The hungry and cold unemployed masses aren't going to continue giving away their intellectual labor
Nor are they going to want to pay for software they have been used to download for free. This sounds more like the wishful thinking of somebody who really wants open source and free software to go away.
If you have been travelling the world, you will probably have noticed that the poorer the country, the more generous the people. Which makes sense, I think - when you have little, you can understand the plight of others, but when you have much more than you need, you have probably never felt hardship and tend to think that poor people are just lazy.
And when you think about, didn't OSS start out exactly because there were clever, but poor people, who couldn't afford to buy expensive software? That alone should tell us that open source will become more prevalent in times of hardship.
It's a major economic recession, so open source will utterly disappear.
Just like it did when the dot-com bubble burst.
Where did this post come from? It's nonsense. There's absolutely no logical connection between the premise and the conclusion.
This is written by someone who lives and breaths profit and may be gunning for a Microsoft admin job. I am a small business owner and am looking at ways to use and support open source more and more. I for one am making my opinion made known with my wallet. Some days I just hate these clueless pundits.
I think he's right. And let me add that I really can't see the need for more than two computers in the world.
Move along, yes.
Anonymous Coward.
There's a strong likelihood we won't even have a recession. GDP was up 2.8 percent in the second quarter.
nt
And the unemployed masses will gladly pay for Windows 7 .... Did I miss something?
I had just installed this Ubuntu thing, and I was starting to like it. It even came complete with a office suite, vector and raster graphic editors, and even games.
Now I guess I'll need to buy a copy of Windows Vista, Microsoft Office, the Adobe suite, anti-virus stuff, and more. Damn it!
factor 966971: 966971
Why not the reverse argument that open source will become more popular than ever as people realize they don't have to spend money on certain programs and instead can use tools such as Ubuntu, OpenOffice and the like?
Eschew Obfuscation
Seems far more likely that an economic crisis will drive up the demand for free software. In addition it will increase the number of talented programmers without day jobs who will then end up creating projects or adding to existing projects due to increased free time... It's not like programmers will stop programming just because they don't have a day job.
"[The iPod has] No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame."
I'm sure "SlashdotMedia" will improve on all the wonders that Dice Holdings blessed us all with
Some of the greatest innovations in US History took place during the Great Depression or right after, especially in social programs, etc. People needed more affordable ways to do things, and industry delivered. From preservatives to food stamps. I think this guy is definitely not looking at it from an end user perspective. I think projects like Ubuntu, OpenOffice, and Firefox are going to see an astronomical rise in support over the next three years. Why? Well, if people are aware that instead of buying a brand new computer they can buy a slightly older one and boot Ubuntu but still be current on all the things they care about, they're going to do that, especially when they find out that all their software updates are going to be free and more and more types of software are being supported. Business, hard up for investment capital, are going to turn away from Mac and M$ and start thinking, "Well, if we cut our tech spending by this much, we can afford this much more in salaries, and increase this much more in profits over the next quarter..." People who program for money now are going to start losing their jobs anyway, and since it's probably something they love to do, there's only two routes for them to go: join the OS revolution, or start their own projects, destined for failure. Innovation is going to soar. I'm not buying it. I think a lot more people will come into my line of work, I mean join the military, as the ability to find a steady paycheck decreases. And if they happen to be techies, then they will represent a steady income for the tech. industry. Not just military, but government jobs generally. And so on. This guy's an idiot. Listen to someone who knows something about open source, that Red Hat CEO guy. Not that I like Red Hat (who does?), but at least he's been around the community a little bit to know these kinds of things...
...in an economy where there are plenty of people willing to pay big bucks for anyone who can find the Control Panel on BOTH XP and Vista?
On the other hand, in an economy where even reasonably intelligent people are out of work and can't build their resume on someone else's dollar, what do you suppose they'll do with all that free time? Take up watching Days Of Our Lives and waiting for the economy to start demanding people with year-long empty spaces on their resumes? Or maybe they'll start working on the open source projects they never had time to work on when they were employed and put THAT on their resumes. And maybe, once Geek Ingenuity (i.e. Linux and PHP as opposed to CDS and mortgage backed securities) has started to put real value back into the world economy, those with money will start to invest again because they'll have something to invest in that seems like it might actually make the world a better places, which can be done for a mutually beneficial profit (i.e. both buyer and seller are better off, as opposed to the zero-sum game on Wall Street).
This guy just doesn't get human nature or economics. People will always give away their work for free, or at least volunteer on cooperative projects, even when the economy is bad. I've technically been "unemployed" for several years as a tech worker (I'm a poorly paid freelancer), but I still give away large amounts of my time and sweat equity to community projects and organizations. People aren't going to stop sharing just because of bad economic times. This article also ignores the fact that FOSS software is more important in a poor economy because it is FREE, as in free beer. If I had to pay for the software to run all of my websites and servers, I could never do what I'm doing now as a freelancer.
iTunes isn't even a "company" in its own right. So, how does he figure that companies "like iTunes" will continue to exist? Statements like that just expose who actually pays for him to give his opinions away for free.
n/t
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
..gives everyone more tools to use to go off and do *real business*, ie, "make money" if that is your goal. Because it eliminates one aspect of artificial scarcity, which then allows you to address real scarcity in real products and services and come up with something new and useful or make your existing business more efficient/whatever. This dude has no idea whatsoever about open source or shared content and how it works, the main basic raw theory. The closed off guilds and company store and town model and giant price fixing efforts through monopolies and cartels is from like centuries ago and has been proven to be a hindrance to progress and increasing wealth and prosperity. Now we still have remnants of it, and more work needs to be done there, but the trend is to share the basic stuff, then go off and work on the fine tuning for your particular niche that you use for business, either a product or service or both. I'll make it even simpler for this guy. I don't care how leet someone is coding, there's only so much a single dude can code. That is worth x. Say it is openly shared, and the dude takes back what other folks contribute and share, takes advantage of it. He now has at his disposal, x plus the combined output of a,b,c,d and etc, all the output from all the other millions of sharers so his "wealth pile" goes up way past whatever was his theoretical top limit on production. And that wealth is tools, to go on and do some real work with those tools. Look at the linux kernel for the primest of examples there.
And what people do for fun or hobbies etc., is just that, fun, and people will continue to do that no matter what, and pay for it, one way or the other, they always have. Hobbies have been around since the first cave dude figured out stringing clamshells on some rawhide and giving it to some cave chick was "productive and fun and a useful pursuit" ;)
As to "blogosphere" and discussion forums, just look how much easier it is to go find out stuff today when you have a real problem, look at the thousands of niche discussion forums where enthusiasts get together and share experiences and tip and tricks and so on. They are all much better off with being able to tap into this pool of people who are into this or that. And news is news, the scene there is a lot better than before, and people will and are "reporting" what they find out or see, then discuss (and cuss) it. Because we as humans like that stuff, it's fun and useful, else we wouldn't be doing it, so it will continue in one form or another, and the internet isn't going away. Maybe some website will go down, but others will be made, that's how that works..
As to the economy, heck ya a lot of jobs will become obsolete, whereas we have a ton of new jobs on the horizon, for example, alternate energy is booming and will continue to boom because of a simple fact. Old (and heavily centralized) energy is invest heavy in infrastructure, then continue to pay for fuel forever (plus all the speculators and monopolists and cartels profits way above cost of production into gouging land due to their fighting to maintain artificial scarcity). Alternate renewable and sustainable energy is invest heavy in infrastructure, then get free fuel forever, because there's no way anyone can cartel-ize the sun and wind and ocean waves..and there's not going to be any scarcity involved with those fuels. Which looks to be a better deal long range, and especially as things get more expensive the "old" way? And like everything else, there's a ton of computer work involved there that folks will need to be doing, then all the blue collar and now they call it "green collar" jobs that will be opening up because of it, and open source work will go to help that computer work get done, and open sharing of knowledge will help entrepreneurs figure out better ways of doing this "energy" thing. And that's just one example, it applies across the board, agriculture, manufacturing, health care, all over.
Eventually, all
More then one commenter assumes that there will be some welfare handed out, allowing people to stay home, pay bills and food and to code to kill to much time on their hands.
If unemployment gets harsh and I mean 1930's harsh, ... well, let's remember that malnutrition puts your brain in "emergency saving" mode, you can't think about anything else but food. I can imagine the choice of object names in those programs ... and what itch will be the most scratched ... and how well "cooked" will that code be.
But Americans have been hearing for around two centuries now from Europeans that we don't give enough deference to our betters. My favorite example being Alexis de Tocqueville lamenting that "ordinary citizens" had too much voice in politics and society, meaning the "elites" didn't get their proper due. This attitude of "listen to your betters, and we'll tell you WHO those betters are" is a distinctly European one.
Maxim: People cannot follow directions.
Increases in truth directly with the length of time spent explaining them
what a big idiot!
`echo $[0x853204FA81]|tr 0-9 ionbsdeaml`@gmail.com
The people so entrenched in the notion that everything can be bought and sold can't see anything but money as motive for ANYTHING.
Some, if not most Free/Open Source software was written to serve a purpose other than money. Linux started out as a school project was it not? Other people just wanted "something better" and ended up doing it themselves.
But these ridiculous pundits will never be able to see anything other than how things are measured in monetary units. If I weren't atheist, I would say "may God have mercy on their souls..."
"it will mean the success of [snip] Mahalo over Google"
Yeah Sure !
How does a story which my beta frontpage informs me was ranked purple on the firehose get posted?
The unskilled Joe-Sixpacks are the ones that will be cold, hungry and unemployed.
I suspect that most of the people that work on projects like Wikipedia, or write Free Software, or that blog, probably aren't having any economic crisis, or at least not so much of one as the average masses.
I for one, am enjoying the huge drop in gas prices. I'm not worried about home values becuase I have no intention of selling mine for quite a long time. I'm also quite secure in my employment.
andrew keen = noted moron
With the new index, you *can* actually mod up and down stories directly on main page. There's no flamebait tag, but there's slownewsday and stupid ones.
Animoog.org
Another paid-by-the-word tech pundit who has no fucking clue what he is talking about.
If the argument in this article is that people in a financial crunch won't have the time to make free software, then here is my counter-argument:
Where did the bootleggers find time to produce and distribute alcohol during the great depression?
You must be a product of the upper/middle class to have come up with that argument in the first place. That naive quasi-stupidity to believe that during hard times just get another job and all will be fine attitude!
Let me spark a few of those brain cells of yours, see if we can't make a thinking person out of you yet.
I know this is engraved at the deepest levels of the conservative's 'soul' but bear with me. Most unemployed people DON'T want to be unemployed. There, now that I've said it, let's look at what happens during a recession/depression.
1. A person trying to find employment seeks an opening in existing companies but finds very few and competition for those few positions very fierce.
2. The person then tries to go into business for themselves but finds that banks are very reluctant to issue small business loans to new businesses because of market conditions.
3. The person finally ends up having to either simply put their business to market, possibly cutting some corners to maybe turn a marginal profit (recession/depression means there is less of a market to sell to).
So our character has lots of free time because that person's currently only working one part time job, since that's all the person could secure. So our character starts to program and finds that shareware or trialware is the best model since people get to try the product out before purchase in a market that has less capital to venture into new software purchasing.
The consumers who were strapped for cash did not have to fork out a dime, found that the software solved their problem like a glove fits a hand, so they budget out the purchase of a full license to maintain legality and our free software business character has made a sale during a market downturn.
My counter argument in a nutshell is that free and open source business models will likely triumph through market recession, having very little overhead/maintenance cost for the business during slow sales times.
Hot air I tell you, hot air..
Really, who is going to pay me to scratch whatever itch I feel like? Who is going to pay me for all of the stuff I particularly feel like doing? While it may be valuable to me and my friends, it holds no intrinsic value as seen by entities that regularly hire and produce individuals to produce "content". The content produced by everyone in their free time is not the same content that people are being paid to produce. Companies that don't know how to tap into this market will be made extinct by it, and my guess is that the dinosaurs spinning this yarn about OSS and user created content going in the toilet are probably really really hoping it will all come true.
Twinstiq, game news
thats why I think the original article is wrong.
Open source is not normally created to assist in selling profitable support services. The licenses under which real open source content is released, do not permit the kind of commercialisation that this poor chap imagines.
While the american economy is completely doomed, long term, the majority of contributions to real open source projects are highly skilled, well paid, employees of major corporations. These people will not be laid off, and their corporate sponsors will continue to invest in open source as a means to cut their own costs. It is, after all, cheaper to develop a product collaboratively, than to develop a product yourself.
Far from open source being hit by an economic downturn, I expect it to flourish at the expense of its proprietary competitors.
I know that my own employer will definitely be phasing out 1500 seats of Microsoft products (although this is because of the massive expense of vendor lockin, rather than the up-front cost), and adopting true standards like ODF for document storage.
I'm undecided:
1. Under Web 2.0: We get his free article.
2. Post-Web 2.0: He wouldn't have written this article.
I mean, really, I'm getting sick of all my open sores!
After 72 hours, it's no longer a crisis; it's just a situation.
I am currently employed and may end up unemployed soon, though ironically enough not because of a potential layoff. I'm moving and may not find a job in my new city. Thankfully, my wife has a great job that is unlikely to be affected by the recession. I've been giving this a lot of thought about what I'd do if should I not find a job. I would probably volunteer for a charitable organization that could use IT support. They wouldn't be able to pay, but they'd get the benefit of my skills and I would use open source software to help reduce their costs. It would show that I'm keeping up my job skills during an economic downturn.
I know some people could not afford to go without work. They need that income.
If companies are looking to cut costs, they'll use open source software. Did the open source software go away when the dot-com bubble burst? No. It's stronger than ever.
"You'll get nothing, and you'll like it!"
At least make up your mind about whom you're knocking. The parent article seems to dislike the ideals behind open-source without bothering to figure out who actually operates on them.
Who the fuck is Andrew Keen?
"The economic crisis will ultimately eliminate Andrew Keen projects and the 'Web 2.0 BS economy,'" says Andrew Keen, author of The Cult of the Pundit. Along with the economic downturn and record job loss, he says, we will see the elimination of projects including the Register, the Inquirer, Seth Finkelstein, and much of the punditsphere. Instead of pundits offering their services "for money," he says, we're about to see a "sharp cultural shift in our attitude toward the economic value of their labour" and a rise of online media businesses that reward their contributors with clues. Companies that will survive, he says, include Slashdot, Wikipedia and XNXX. "The hungry and cold unemployed masses aren't going to continue selling away their intellectual labor on the Internet in the speculative hope that they might get some 'back end' revenue," says Keen.
http://rocknerd.co.uk
The big squeeze is already underway, and it's in marginal ad-supported businesses. Nobody has made real money with banners in years. It's becoming clear that while ads associated with search results have value, all those vaguely relevant ads that Google puts on the web sites of others don't really generate many sales.
Likely outcomes for the next few years:
This article sounds to me like software big business wishful thinking, hoping to convince everyone that free stuff is not meant to be, and please just forget open source and return to buying triple and quadruple digits software suites already.
The majority of the "unknown" hackers are simply students, hobbyists and loyalists
Will the students still have the money to pay post-secondary tuition, and will the hobbyists still have the spare time to continue their hobbies, or will they need to find employment to make up for a cash and credit crunch?
There will still be plenty of Librarians and bored people out of work...... Wikipedia will probably experience exponential growth in New Articles and Revisions.
he has a point. as ads revenue goes lower, the expense to pay the bandwith will force to change the model to one monetized, so the ability to give content will die.
but that may kill sites like slashdot, wikipedia, and others.. but no the guy that develop drivers. If your work is source code and need 8 KB of hosting, I doubt will be hard to host. But If your proyect need 600 MB, ..who know? bandwith aint cheap, and with the crisis, you may need the money for something else.
apparently the author didn't read yesterday's article http://linux.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/10/21/0116221
The guy's reasoning is idiotic, if anything, the blogosphere brings business in for many independent professionals, it's free advertising. My flickr page brings in some work, because I can show my images to many people. Also, most open source projects are a work of passion for certain subject. The author refuses to accept that the economy is changing and the internet is leveling the field so that talented people finds a lower entry barrier for monetizing their craft. That's not to say that classic economics don't apply here, projects with a high cost of operation still need to fund their operations somehow or be eaten. Nothing new here to see. Meanwhile web hosting and bandwidth are a really cheap outlet for us pros to show our work.
Greetings, programs!
Heck, if you're an unemployed programmer, what else are you going to do?
I'd guess unemployed programmers would have to find something other than programming to do during the day in order to keep a roof over their kids' heads.
That's funny because, according to economists, it was impossible for open source to exist in the first place...
All of this guy's reasoning could equally be applied to television. Sure, tough times might make some people watch less TV because they would rather be productive by reducing costs or making money. And some people probably won't be able to work as much on Wikipedia. But despite this impending "sharp cultural shift in our attitude toward the economic value of our labor" I'm betting that Wikipedia and television will both continue to flourish.
One of the oldest opensources is the Bible. It is a business nonsense, you're right.
The two services we offer are drinking and arguing, both always in demand in tough times. Broadly speaking our current strategy is to spend our way through the recession. Economist friends tell me this is akin to smoking your way through a heart attack, but if there's one thing we ought to have learned, it's that economists can't be trusted.
Corporate migration to Vista will just about stop. The people who need it have already converted, and nobody else needs to spend the money, especially if a hardware upgrade is required. Microsoft will cave on XP life extension until Windows 7 works.
Windows 7 is Vista. It's already been scaled back from the original "Totally modular, new clean API, runs legacy Windows apps in Classic emulation" to "We're gonna pull some of the bloat out of Vista".
Mojave anyone?
"One of the very few positive consequences of the current financial miasma will be a sharp cultural shift in our attitude toward the economic value of our labor." Pay attention to the -positive- word! - "Mass unemployment and a deep economic recession comprise the most effective antidote to the utopian ideals of open-source radicals." Man, this is so funny! - "Being paid to work is intuitive to the human condition; it represents our most elemental sense of justice." Sense of justice? Dear lord! And get better...
Even assuming this guy were right in his assumptions about the nature of open source and its equivalence to the "web 2.0 free economy," the GPL would save us from this greed that comes of fear.
OMG! we're running out of money, let's stop using this libre software! Let's pay for licenses and just beg for the features we need. Run! run! run!
I'm not so sure about that. I see the point that if you have no money you might want to sell things rather than give them away.
However, like other readers here, I think this guy doesn't understand the OSS culture. Without going into the anthropological details, let me just say that OSS is not going away any time soon.
the economy flows in cycles http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_cycles. open source has been around longer then most of them, depending on which theories you believe http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Source_history. i don't recall open source dieing after the 2001 tech bubble, and that was pretty serious. actually, i think i upgraded my FBSD box's OS around then. For that matter, open source licensing is a preferred method to release programs/code for many different reasons, but ultimately because it's advantageous.
I predict that this is exactly backwards and that people with time on their hands and a desire to prove themselves will contribute more to open source, not less.
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This is that guy who thinks "culture" is synonymous with high-production-value television programming.
In my opinion, economic crisis might have the reverse effect: it will demonstrate how little "value" there is in money. Your dollar is worth less, but free stuff is still free.
I know it's a pipe dream, but this could be just one more step toward society minus money.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
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It is official. Netcraft now confirms: *BSD is dying
One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered *BSD community when IDC confirmed that *BSD market share has dropped yet again, now down to less than a fraction of 1 percent of all servers. Coming on the heels of a recent Netcraft survey which plainly states that *BSD has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. *BSD is collapsing in complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by failing dead last [samag.com] in the recent Sys Admin comprehensive networking test.
You don't need to be the Amazing Kreskin [amazingkreskin.com] to predict *BSD's future. The hand writing is on the wall: *BSD faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for *BSD because
*BSD is dying. Things are looking very bad for *BSD. As many of us are already aware, *BSD continues to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood.
FreeBSD is the most endangered of them all, having lost 93% of its core developers. The sudden and unpleasant departures of long time FreeBSD developers Jordan Hubbard and Mike Smith only serve to underscore the point more clearly. There can no longer be any doubt: FreeBSD is dying.
Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.
OpenBSD leader Theo states that there are 7000 users of OpenBSD. How many users of NetBSD are there? Let's see. The number of OpenBSD versus NetBSD posts on Usenet is roughly in ratio of 5 to 1. Therefore there are about 7000/5 = 1400 NetBSD users. BSD/OS posts on Usenet are about half of the volume of NetBSD posts. Therefore there are about 700 users of BSD/OS. A recent article put FreeBSD at about 80 percent of the *BSD market. Therefore there are (7000+1400+700)*4 = 36400 FreeBSD users. This is consistent with the number of FreeBSD Usenet posts.
Due to the troubles of Walnut Creek, abysmal sales and so on, FreeBSD went out of business and was taken over by BSDI who sell another troubled OS. Now BSDI is also dead, its corpse turned over to yet another charnel house.
All major surveys show that *BSD has steadily declined in market share. *BSD is very sick and its
long term survival prospects are very dim. If *BSD is to survive at all it will be among OS dilettante dabblers. *BSD continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, *BSD is dead.
Fact: *BSD is dying
Plain and simple he obviously has no clue why we work on open source projects. He has also never done community theater. When you can't afford to pay for something you write it. When you want something done differently you write it. When your entertainment choice is too expensive you do it yourself. Its really simple. I bring to mind the case of Argentina who went through an economic collapse in 2002 and where open source flourished because no one had money to buy the expensive enterprise software.
Why bother
"Back end" is in quotes because he's referring to anal sex, right? RIGHT?
While I hate to admit it, pretty much all of my past contributions to OSS projects have not been to benefit some altruistic "community" as much as to benefit myself. I use OSS quite often to do things that I want or need, and if the software is missing something that I want or need and I'm capable of adding it, I often do. I then make sure to contribute my changes to the project so that future updates include my changes. This pattern of behavior has nothing to do with economics and is unlikely to change due to economic conditions.
That's such crap. Weblogs don't equal news. There's almost NO reliable news sources in "blog" format.
It's all anecdotal, partisan, and un-researched crap.
You can't get any reliable news from blogs. It's a waste of time to try.
Blogs will never replace the normal news outlets and these "bloggers" are deluding themselves if they think they will.
- It's not the Macs I hate. It's Digg users. -
Even if all open-source contributors would starve tomorrow, the software would still continue to exist, the servers would be humming along offering the same sources and binaries for download etc. It could never die as long as there are copies somewhere. All that could happen is that it wouldn't improve/progress/expand anymore. But more realistically it would just evolve at a slower pace, IF the guy's arguments had any merits, that is.
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The GP is more right than you think for one simple reason: economists are not employed by everyman and woman.
Economists either work for the private sector, or for government. Neither is especially interested in you looking after your own kid. For the private sector, there's no profit in it; for the government, there's no tax revenue. Both private sector and state policy are therefore aligned with what the GP attributes to "economics".
You are of course right in the strict sense of economics as an academic discipline.
Wikileaks, no DNS
"The only function of economic forecasting is to make astrology look respectable."
Yeah! The mainstream media is an incredibly good way to get clear, concise, and unbiased information...
Gaaaak!
This article is based on the premise that hungry out-of-work programmers that have been doing work in their spare time will start demanding payment for this work and not do it.
That couldn't be further from what might happen.
Out-of-work programmers have free time. They have skills that are always becoming more and more out of date the longer they're not programming on the bleeding edge. These programmers take on projects to keep themselves occupied. They take on projects to home their skills. They try and better themselves to add lines to their resume and produce a project that, in an interview, they can list their contributions to.
So yes- those programmers will need to pay the bills, but when the alternate is doing nothing, why wouldn't they keep themselves sharp?
Nonetheless, the good programmers that we want to be contributing to the open-source world and probably the ones that keep their jobs anyway.
-M
when you see the word 'Linux', drink!
I've always wondered what would happen if computer scientists/programmers ever realized the economic impact of free, open-source programming on their job market.
I could be wrong here as my field is not economics, but it seems to me that any contributions made by computer scientists/programmers for free to the marketplace would tend to reduce salaries and jobs for paid programmers. For instance, take linux. If people have a high quality, free, open-source program like linux to use in many different applications, undoubtedly such a program would be used by at least some customers who would have paid for a different alternative. To the extent that programmers contributed their time for free to the development of linux, they have reduced the money that would otherwise have flowed to paid developers. Ultimately, this has to result in fewer paid jobs and/or lower salaries for developers, as businesses realize that they do not have to send as much on technology.
I understand the value that people get from contributing to open-source software, whether it be the joy of a hobby, gaining experience, or simply the desire to see a better product than what currently can be purchased. I also understand the values of open-source and open standards. What I have trouble with is the notion that so many should give so much of their labor away for free, when those same folks are having to compete for jobs and salary in an ever more difficult and tight market, especially in this economy.
Masses of Software Engineers on the street corner "Spare some WiFi for a former code jockey." "I'm a vetran of the first Dot Com Bubble."
Surely with more people sitting at home, unemployed, with nothing to do other than look for a job, and desperate to make their cv stand out more than everyone else in there situation, the amount of speculative work produced may in fact rise?
I'm just going to sit around the apartment, staying drunk, surfing pr0n and feeling sorry for myself all day long while living off the new Obama dole.
Heck, maybe I'll even whip up some cheesy flash cartoons and put them on a website so everyone else can share in my misery.
If the economy is going to be as bad as this guy is suggesting, the "hungry, cold, unemployed masses" are not going to have a computer or access to the internet anyway. Computers and the internet are a luxury, and will be one of the first things to go in most peoples lives.
*looks up from coding on open source project.
*says "rurrrr?"
*returns to coding.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
This clueless clown doesn't know what he's talking about. Anyway, if someone is un-employed, has free time and want's to keep his skills up, he will be more likely to help out with open source projects.
I take no responsibility for what I say. Even though I'm never wrong
Look, I don't have a million dollars in the bank or in gold nor a million dollar house or a house at all. Economics has always been the reason that I've not contributed more to open source. I need to look out for number one. While I've published some open source software and contributed so a couple of projects I'm interested in leveraging my labor for cashola and what I value most: free time to pursue my interests without the need to be a employment slave, or a contracting slave, or a consulting slave to corporate masters of the universe set on global domination or destruction.
It may well be that my some or all of my software and hardware works may enter the open source or public domain at some point. What's important to me now is achieving a level of financial independence from those with small minds and controlling annoyance in my life. To achieve that I need to maximize income earning potentials from all my labors whether they be provided for by being a corporate slave in some manner or via projects that generate income from other direct or indirect sources. Sure I get tiny revenues from advertising and am working to scale that up 1000 fold but it's an unknown if it will work.
The current financial situation simply means I need to be more aware of what I'm charging and what others are and up my prices at the appropriate time. Since being in this industry the prices of everything have risen two to five times. For example, a movie used to be $2.50 and now it costs $12.50 to see a feature film and that's not counting another $15 for the snack bar. Somehow though my hourly rates haven't increased five fold; you can imagine how my customers react when they hear that I want $100, $150, $200, $250 per hour for 40 to 60 hours per week for their entire two year project. They are aghast... something has to give. So, if you can't make enough to pay for the house in your town/city (typical homes cost $750,000 to $1,000,000 where I live) you've got to figure out how or move to cheaper places (there are few of those left where I'd want to live).
So yes, I choose to earn a living first and foremost.
Yes, I will at times contribute to open source projects; usually when it's in my interest to do so and as long as those open source projects are BSD Style or Public Domain aka Truly Free Licenses so that others can maximize their economic advantage.
Hey, if you want to be a socialist or a commune-ist then fine, just don't include me in your plans.
In the coming economic hardships, no one will be willing to troll for free anymore!
DRM: Terminator crops for your mind!
...dimestore opinion hack who just doesn't really understand... well, anything really, and has apparently subscribed to the Trend Du Jour, using pseudointellectual "truthiness" to as a prognostication and analysis tool.
The gaping hole in this one?
If anything he were saying in his pop-psychological ramblings were true, why would this behavior need an "economic downturn" to show itself? Hmm? Wouldn't it be more logical to assume that if people felt like they could make money off of this at any point in the past that we would ALREADY be hip-deep in Interwebbitube Profiteerism (TM) by now? Why would, say Wikipedia, continue to this day to be "open" if people en masse figured out that they wanted to be paid for contributions? Why would it have to be in times of "economic uncertainty" which would be necessary to bring out this incisively revealing psychological phenomenon?
I mean, just because this guy has found a way to profit from being entirely full of shit doesn't mean that everyone else has the same aspirations, does it? It only means that HE needs to be paid to sling his worthless opinion around. As an "entrepreneur", certainly he must have an idea of the motivations of the Internet population, so I'm kind of shocked to see this kind of spew from someone who should really know better.
The poor idiot starving masses you mean. Looking for a job is a full time job in itself (and actually is more labor intensive than actually having a job, in many cases, especially in IT). If you have nothing better to do while being unemployed, you deserve to starve.
Sometimes it's worth taking on a project for the same reason that one goes on training courses. Doing your project could arguably be better than anything else (including searching for work) after the first 'n' hours. There is literally nothing better to do.
What happens if you turn up for interview and you've forgotten some important aspect of coding because you've only been focused upon looking for work?
Just wondering. Given your aversion to anything with an indirect benefit, claiming that people who take that approach "deserve to starve", are you in management?
Wikileaks, no DNS
The hungry and cold unemployed masses aren't going to continue giving away their intellectual labor on the Internet...
Yes I am, especially now that I am unemployed and have nothing better to do.
I am not all that hungry or massive right at this moment but I am kind of cold
If you follow this logic, no one would ever do any work for charity. We all know this is not the case. Mr. Keen has not thought through his argument properly.
plz dont make this man aware of his mis-understanding FOSS.
He thinks because of economic problems we will have to pay royalty to use English and Roman letters - perhaps even to use Arab numbers.
We'll hit Singularity by 50 years--no comparing to history after that!
I have always enjoyed releasing my projects open source (usually LGPL, sometimes GPL) but the economy has convinced me that I need to make what used to be give-away projects be at least partially revenue generating.
I am starting to wrap new software projects with free PDF web books and the code is free for any non-commercial use. If readers buy a for-fee PDF or a print on demand book, then they get a commercial use license for the project code. (Current project: Java AI; next AllegroGraph based book on Semantic Web; after that Semantic Web with Java (Sesame, Jena, OWL-API, etc.)
I don't like doing this, but I think that the economy is going to get very bad and stay that way for a long time and I feel like I need to make my non-consulting time also be revenue generating even if it is fairly small change.
This could be serious if he taked as reference people that works on OpenSource and collaborate. Most of them are students so they even don't take on the economic crisis since students are always a growing population. Most of them are doing nothing so they got into OSS as a consequence and if there's less money then there's less job then there's more people doing nothing.
And yes, my justification is as poor as he justification so both got self-eliminated, but, you cannot say something is gonna get eliminated when is an obvious step to take when money is not high: use free stuff, then they have to collaborate in one or another way and OSS get bigger.
ghostbar page.
Andy writes this drivel and posts it on a blog. The kind that will go away. In the future, Andy will get paid to write about the perils of open source, global warming, software piracy, etc. Evidently, he fails to realize how many people get paid to blog about those topics RIGHT NOW!
I was going to leave a comment, but then i realised that it wasn't going to make me any money.
Really? People will stop pursuing hobbies like writing code because no one is paying them? What about amateur musicians? Will they stop posting songs on myspace because they should be getting paid for it? I will most likely stop posting videos on youtube myself, because why should everyone enjoy my videos without paying me for it? This guy did not think this one through.
Remember reading an economist who observed that people tend to do things for one of three reasons.
Financial, social, or moral. Sometimes all of the above.
As long as we're making arbitrary predictions about people's motives, I'm guessing that my workplace is going to see more use of F/OSS. If you have a mix of both, and a staff that can manage either, it makes more sense to listen to the IT guys saying "we could do this better and cheaper if you quit buying stuff without our input."
Open source "for the people by the people" will eventually cause a replacement of the economic system to something much better.
Money isn't the only thing that motivates people.
Well, that was a damn good guess by the guy making the article...
Obviously though, the disappearance of open source won't have anything to de with the crisis, but it'll be the final part of the secret plan by us contributors to take every site containing free (as in freedom) software off line and then activate our mega obfuscated embedded trojan encryters and demand huge ransoms from all the users for their data (who the hell reads all the source code properly anyway).
Heck did you users really believe we were writing good quality software for free without seeking any financial benefit benefit?
..because during an economic crisis, people will want to pay for frivolous content, which was free during the economic boom.
As Napoleon said, never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake.
Don't correct this guy, but don't his page visits either.
cheers,
Andrew
Anything is *possible*, but I'd be willing to bet you're completely wrong.
Most people working on open-source projects seem to have put the work on the "back burner" from very early on. This isn't some new status for them.
If you have doubts of that, just look at all the abandoned projects to be found on Sourceforge.
The exceptions tend to be the relative few regular contributors to the "high profile" projects that have the most popularity. (EG. Firefox or Open Office) I think that's probably because the "status" of being a part of something that well known and successful has definite "value". It earns the person a certain level of respect in the community and that has a clear chance of translating to financial benefits when interviewing for jobs.
9 times out of 10, the people doing a free, open-source project do so for the learning aspect of it, and because it solves some personal computer dilemma they're experiencing. (If you're working on the next great video format converter utility, I'm willing to bet you're somebody who had a personal need to convert a bunch of video.) I don't see why a poor economy would drive noticeable numbers of these people to quit writing code that personally helps them in their daily lives?
Why?
1) More opportunities for consulting work. I have noticed that even though I have a full time job, the opportunities for consulting work have as of late exploded.
I am not sure why, but I think it might have to do with the fact managers can reduce head counts and look good, but still get stuff done if they hire consultants to do the work.
Bad times ironically mean good times for me, anyway.
Here is hoping for that mythical good time 5000 Dow!
2) As many have pointed out, we already have a revenue model that works, and since the majority of the projects are free software, why would good times vs bad times make any difference in open source project managers decisions moneywise?
My guess is because open source is driven with something beyond money, unlike commercial software:
We just want to make the best software, without direct cash flow restrictions or bean counters messing things up.
Yes, this secret sauce is why open source delivers fewer bugs in software and has much more potential to crack very hard computer science problems.
Like building a decent OS Kernel. :-)
3) Finally, I have a huge list but the last reason this guy is full of rocks in his head is because open source is no longer just an economy.
It is a bonafide social movement. That includes all of the politics that is included with any major social movement.
As a open source developer and promoter, none of the values that this political ideology encompass rely on money:
1) Build the finest software.
2) Include the Binaries and the Source code.
3) Document the whole system including the build tool chain, which is also open source.
I mean, can anyone here point out what aspect of the GPL v2 or v3 is harmed because we bailed out a bunch of fat cats and criminals and now we are going to have years worth of flat or negative economic growth?
I am not even sure I will get student loans next year because I live debt free for example. With how the credit system is rigged, people who live debt free are considered HUGE risks.
But that is another comment on a different storyline. :-)
-Hackus
Got Geometrodynamics? Awe, too hard to figure out? Too bad.
The author has a very narrow view of what motivates one to contribute to open source. He also seems to lump a lot of different trends involving people banging on a keyboard w/o pay into the same thing.
He seems to think that people write blogs and participate in social networks out of some charitable desire to better the world with free journalism. I suppose there is some of that out there, Groklaw perhaps? I think most of it comes from a desire to be heard, to be recognised. That and simply a need to socialize. This is human nature and will not go away simply because there is a recession. Not while the power is still on anyway! He also mentions the monetary value of some of these sites. This comes purely from advertising. They will lose this if things become so bad that companies can't afford to advertise but short of that they will be ok.
As for open source software, sure, some people donate code simply as a gift to society. Some may even refocus their efforts towards more for-profit things as they get short on cash. That's only a small fraction of the reason people and organisations contribute to OSS. Mostly I think it's just because they want the feature or bugfix that they are working on but don't want to have to maintain the whole codebase just to get it! Even if you fix something or add the feature then keep it to yourself you lose because your fix might not be compatible with the next release. Until existing software, open or closed satisfies all of all user's needs with no bugs there will still be this motivation to contribute code. Even to the leader of the project it's less work if it's shared among other coders.
On the other hand, expensive support might be a tougher sell to struggling companies who may by supporting their own software. This could hurt the write it for free, make money on the support business model. Then again, these same companies will not want to pay for extra IT staff and more training. It may be cheaper to just buy the support contract.
As for OSS users, OSS is usually also free. It doesn't have to be but it's hard to put DRM in source code, it can just be ripped out and rebuilt. Given hard times one would certainly think that being free is a good selling point.
The only way that will happen is if the voter fraud is so blatantly obvious and widespread (think significantly more votes cast than registered voters after removal of the folks residing six feet under in a widespread pattern of any sort) that current government is forced to declare the election null and void to prevent a civil war.
Of course, that will not really lead to a 3rd Bush term, but "W" might have to hang on long enough to set up a new election for his replacement. Leftwing nutjobs to the contrary, the vast majority of folks have had more than plenty of Bush already. But if y'all want to claim McCain is really Bush in a clever disguise, then you must also grant the rightwing nutjobs claim that Obama is really not a native born citizen.
Geez, when it is so fricken simple to end an argument, why can't the guy just release a copy of his honest to god birth certificate? (perhaps the same reasoning Kerry used to refuse torelease of his military records detailing just how he earned his Purple Hearts?)
We simply need to drill Haley's comet.
1.) Fly to comet.
2.) Drill for ice.
3.) Drop giant ice cube in ocean.
4.) Profit $$$ (survive?)
(no need to worry about raising sea levels or anything of course.)
if I were able to see further, it was because I stood on the shoulders of Giants -Newton
"If anything he's gonna sit on his severance package a few months and write that OpenOffice patch he hasn't had time to work on."
A severance package in the US that covers more than 2 weeks? That was rare even before the economic turndown. It also might be a good idea to start looking for a job before running out of money.
I'm glad Keen has said this, because it's going to be easy enough to find out if he's right or not. Personally, I think his prediction will be reversed: there will in fact be *more* of the sort of thing he's talking about (mainly because what he's attacking are essentially leisure persuits, which, in times of hardship people will do more of as long as there isn't too high a monetary cost - just as k lifestyle magazine publishers like Conde Nast).
But, like I say, let's wait and see. I'm printing a copy of the article to put on my wall to consult in a few years time and (I hope) laugh like a drain at the idiocy of man.
BTW if you've read his book, you'll know I'm being rather kind to him.
"And the meaning of words; when they cease to function; when will it start worrying you?"
And, similarly, others who die slumped over their keyboards, their most recent anti-Obama screed sitting in front of them in their blog editor, as it waits patiently for the 'submit' button-press that will never come.
People do things because they're bored and have free time, and in the case of open source code often because it looks good on the resume to have been involved with open source projects, like charity work...
Unemployed people generally have more free time, and less money to spend on doing other things with their time..
They also have more of a need to do things that will look good on their resume.
They are also less likely to be able to afford proprietary software, and are more likely to be motivated to replace it with their own alternative.
I know if i was unemployed, i would spend the time trying to improve my chances of getting another job, wether that be raising my profile by releasing open source code, or just writing code for practice or to learn new technologies or languages.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
The author claims, among other things, that Mahalo will win out over Google. Mahalo has Google Adsense on the search result pages.
Okay, first off: economists do not believe that people do everything for money. Anyone who thinks that isn't an economist, or doesn't deserve to be, because they've thoroughly missed the point.(1)
Economists believe people do things because of utility. You can call it "happiness", or "units of feel-good", or whatever, but that's what it's all about. ;-)
However, since it's hard to define a unit of warm fuzziness that works for everyone, we use a proxy: money. Why? Because it's convenient, that's all. So please discard your clichéd, prejudiced notion of economists. We"re all about making people happy
Secondly: though I don't agree with this extremity of the author's view, his thrust bears consideration. The development of FOSS, if one were to order it on a hierarchy of needs – for example, Maslow's hierarchy of needs – is clearly not a key activity. I wouldn't even place it in the lowest three categories.(2) An economic downturn, OTOH, clearly strikes at an individual's job; his feelings of safety and security; perhaps even his sense of confidence (not uncommon after being laid off). And before you go about seeking esteem or self-actualisation by working on your quite-popular-but-not-profitable Firefox extension, you're going to spend a little bit more time working because you don't want to be the guy first on the list to be sacked.
So while I wouldn't go so far as to agree with Keen's argument that the development of FOSS and socially created content will stop, I'd certainly agree that an economic downturn would reduce it.
Cheers,
Sapphon
(1) Andrew Keen, for the record, isn't an economist: he studied history and political science, according to the Wik.
(2) Excluding people who do it for a living, of course. But then it's not FOSS, which is what Keen is obviously talking about, even if he doesn't use the Slashdot-approved nomenclature.
Antiquis temporibus, nati tibi similes in rupibus ventosissimis exponebantur ad necem.
He never attended Harvard College. Columbia didn't require an undergrad thesis. Selective Service registrations include social security numbers and are privileged. Medical records are privileged. He is forbidden by law to release a list of his clients as a lawyer. There's no reason to think he published any articles in the Harvard Law Review. His vote record in the Illinois State Senate is public record and freely available.
Finland went through very similar economic crisis during early 90s (http://www.hs.fi/english/article/US+economic+crisis+Finnish+d%C3%A9j%C3%A0+vu/1135239664850).
Guess who was rooted to his terminal coding during all this time? (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linus_Torvalds)
Guess what happened when he decided - apparently against all common sense - to release his work (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_source)?
I also think if the economic crisis is large and IBM and the likes start to bleed red, then they will enforce patents on linux and FOSS software.
In the end a corporation is a corporation and it is their duty and law to maximize shareholder wealth.
Imagine every company running Linux servers paying XYZ corp $100 per year per server!
That could generate billions of dollars per year for XYZ corp!!
Bla, bla, bla.
Just another fool who fell into the economist trap. What he calls "labour", the people who actually do it call "hobby". It's not "unpaid work", stupid. There is more to life than work and consumerism.
One big, very big, area is that humans do a tremendeous amount of things for social currency - networking, making friends, spending time with friends, or just being "with other people" (instead of lonely).
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Ho ho ho. I see Charles Leadbeater thinks otherwise:
"A recession will be a boon for the webâ(TM)s pro-am, do-it-yourself ethic. Professional social networks such as Linked In may come into their own as out-of-work people look for jobs. There may be more Popbitch and less Heat magazine; more use of free, open-source software than expensive offerings from Microsoft; more recycling of secondhand goods through eBay and freecycling schemes; more sharing of resources like cars through websites like GoLoco and Liftsharing. The collaborative, low-cost organisational models the web allows will come into their own; high-cost industrial-era models will suffer."
"And the meaning of words; when they cease to function; when will it start worrying you?"
Crackhead if anything it will cause an explosion of
use to save money and more folks with time on there hands to help out.
So, this guy is like Sauron then. Sauron can't fathom that anyone who posses the Ring won't use it for his own personal gain. Does this makes OSS proponents, Hobbits?
The experts agree the tech world will be somewhat insulated from the financial market eating itself. We hope. Given that, if consumers no longer have to cash to burn on over priced iStuff that supports the big silicon, then they will start looking for free alternatives. If anything there will be a gravity drawing consumers away from things that cost money to things that don't. I'd not be surprised to see a influx during a depression of participants to the Web 2.0 which would mitigate loss of Ad revenue that supports these services.
As for open systems and their development, I think many miffed, out of work programmers might jump on the FOSS bandwagon in a recession - and consumers who can't afford expensive broken operating systems may pirate an older version or pick up linux to put on a older machine. Oh and watch for used goods markets gaining strength.
After logging in slashdot still does not take you back to the page you were on. It's been that way for 20 years.
won't people become more competitive for jobs spots and have a need to stand out with their resumes? who are you going to hire - the guy that contributed to OSS and has his code used by thousands of people or the guy that sat at home watching days of our lives. There will always be the work experience kid.
for(b=(a=0)+1;;b+=(a+=b))print(a+"\n"+b+"\n");
What an incredible load of bullshit from someone otherwise knowledgable on the area. I'm quite baffled that he doesn't seem to realize that open source is more of a philosophy (some might even call it a religion) than anything else, money or no money. Open source isn't charity, it's a community-oriented development approach that will exist because *the community* needs it.
'The hungry and cold unemployed masses aren't going to continue giving away their intellectual labor on the Internet in the speculative hope that they might get some "back end" revenue,' says Keen." Apparently the possibility of doing something with motivations and benefits other than "revenue" is beyond the realm of that the average suit is capable of conceiving. The economic crisis is in large part the result of similar primitivism and narrow-minded beancounting mentality; it it could eliminate those, it would not be all bad.
Because the only open source project I ever worked on was something I started when I had six weeks of unemployed time to fill.
The cake is a pie
9. Certified Copy of original Birth Certificate -- Not Released
10. Embossed, signed paper Certification of Live Birth -- Not Released
More proof that Obama is a god-descended being sent here to save us. Oh crap I just got baited.
Yes, that last sentence was to dissuade negative moderation.
signature is pants
The economic downturn certainly won't kill open source. Like everyone else here has said, some people just don't do it for the money. If anything, I could see an economic downturn to boost open source. Supposedly more businesses are being turned on to the idea of open source, which is going to increase IT professionals' interest in it. In addition, we may see an increase in donations from businesses into open source projects.
Aside from all that, the article cites unemployment as a reason for the downturn. I could see these unemployed people spending more time on open source projects. Plus layoffs = unemployment = gov't paycheck.
... I saved the money that is allowing me to be unemployed for the next couple of years if I wish so.
The way to despair is paved with bad anecdotes buddy.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
For many people open source may be the only way to make a living.
Full swaths of businesses, specially small ones, will have a hard look at those licenses for closed source software.
People savvy in open source offerings, how they work and how they are supported will be ideally positioned to make money.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Didn't we have an article just yesterday saying the Economic Crisis Favors Open Source?
I am currently unemployed.
The job offers I am getting (yep, they are coming in spite of me not looking, maybe the inexperienced, exploited chaps in India, Hello chaps in Mumbai!, can't cope with the management of complex systems), anyway, I was saying, the job offers I am getting are increasingly related to Open Source software.
Companies are going to be using much more Open Source software.
Think: you need a new prototype, and need to set up a website. Will you go for your pilot for Oracle, MS's web server (what was its name?) and what, scripting in C#? Or will you chose a LAMP stack without support?
Think: you need 10 new desktops to do menial clerical work and you are hurting economically. Will you spend thousands of $LOCAL_CURRENCYin licensing or will you maybe give a go to this Lunix thingy your IT guy has been begging you to try because it is cheap (or even free).
Unemployed people had lots of time on their hands, it is not like all your waking hours are devoted to finding a job or working in a menial one. People will still have free time, and for those whose passion is Open Source a recession will just be a different period in their lives during which they had much more time to code.
Let introduce the dreaded world: depression, What percentage of unemployment do you fancy to talk about? 10%? 20%? 50%? In any case there will be a sizeable amount of the population working, and amongst those there will continue to be Open Source proponents, users and enhancers, and amongst of the many unemployed would be techies wondering how to go back to full employment for whom Open Source would be the only way to set up a viable low cost small business or a relatively cheap time diversion.
Honestly, people that keep harping against open source don't even understand the motivations of the people that actually work on it.
Hint: it is not the f*****g money .
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
BSD license allows proprietary code.
Article applies to GPL-style business-hostile licenses.
He contends that because the desire to work for money is basically intuitive for everyone that by the time 1 in 10 people are unemployed a dramatic cultural change will sweep the nation and alter the entire commercial landscape.
Guess he has never actually met a human.
Seriously now.
If there's a proper economic crises one of the things you see is people staying at home, watching more TV, more movies, using the computer more.
You see less cinema, less holidays, less outdoor expensive activities.
People will stay at home, on their computers, those inclined to code will continue to code.
The only way open source will be 'eliminated' is if computers or the internet is eliminated, pretty unlikely even in a bad economic crises.
I'm 30 years old and have never been to university, I rate a 99 on an IQ test and even I know this. /. we're better than this - at least let us debate something worth debating huh?
I can only assume this is a troll for advertisements or just someone bored, cmon
I publish bits of stuff I produce, through my job as well as my home hobby stuff, as open source because it's a cheap and easy way to get people to help debug the code.
It's also an easy/cheap way to get traffic and inbound links to your website which is beneficial.
There is no way I'm going to stop writing and releasing code so wanks like this guy are just sniffing glue. If anything, I'm more likely to publish code as open source when the economy isn't as good because I can't afford to hire so many programmers and QA people.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
This *blatant* troll provided me with quite an enjoyable chuckle at my desk at work. How wrong do you want to be in print? Why - THIS wrong! :)
It's better than some random blog. Blogs are - nearly all of them - just random musings from every day people. Usually, they will have a severe bias one way or another, and never (practically speaking) check facts.
No single news source should be taken as 100% accurate or unbiased, but I do trust that what they're telling me on CNN is accurate to the best of their knowledge, or that they big newspapers (sans editorials) will try their best to make sure that they are printing is accurate.
But hey, if you want want to get all your news from angry bloggers spewing nonsense with absolutely zero credibility, go for it! I'm sure you can get your conspiracy theory fix really easy there.
- It's not the Macs I hate. It's Digg users. -
My small, none IT, buisness runs on all linux and open source software. Savings is conservatively well over $250,000 US a year, when I throw in the desktops, mail servers, web servers, and so on with just about a half dozen employees. I would likely not be able to afford to be in buisness if it was not for open source software. You can not compete with free. This is the open source coming out party. I am just bummed there has not been more IPO's yet for open source companies so I can pick up some more stock. Guess I will just settle for donating to my favorite open source project, as it directly makes me money everyday.
Living in Chile
Economically this joker may think he makes sense. Factually no.
A walk through pages of history shows that free & selfless labor has always increased during times of economic crisis:
1. Panic of 1873 & 1893 many ex-bankers in Vienna and US turned to writing free-to-read books and articles on economic standards and the like. Some took to painting and produced good works of art which donated to museums around the world.
2. The Alexandria Library is a fine example: its burning down resulted in destruction of many books, but many more were written again from memory and scrolls and distributed free.
3. The Bible was a book that was handwritten free many times by churches during the 100-year war and the 1870 conflicts.
4. Penicillin and other medicines were produced and distributed at low cost during crisis.
"Doing what i can, with what i have." ~ Burt Gummer
The economic crisis will strengthen free (libre) software: during an economic crisis people need to innovate and think of ways to increase their productivity (more production for less effort). Free software and open source software, as well as free and open content like text, need less effort to be produced and the end result is of higher quality. Therefore, as people seek ways to increase their productivity during the economic crisis, everyone will embrace free and open source because as a model of production it allows for much higher productivity to be realised. With closed source software you end up writing the code very similar to that written by your neighbour, because both of you are afraid to let one another see their code. That's absurd. With open source, neighbours let one another see their code and with free software they can benefit from the other's source code so that they don't end up writing the same thing twice. This translates to productivity gains, which is exactly what people seek during an economic crisis.
People offering their labour to free software projects or other similar efforts do not do so for free. They do get paid, but the payment is not in cash: when I participate in a free software project and I have a wish for it, I write down some code implementing my wanted feature. This acts as a catalyst for other developers to come in, either to fix bugs or to implement their own wishes on top of mine (their wishes may have come as a result of my implementation, for example if I implement an OS with a CLI, other people will want a GUI, but if there were no OS to begin by there would be no wish for a GUI at all). One wish leads to another, and the software being free we can all work on realising our wishes. This is my payment when I participate in open source: other people do the same thing and I end up having a superior product in the end, as my participation acts as a catalyst for others to join, and the participation of others acts as a catalyst for my own continuing participation in the project. The result of this participation, the improved software, is part of my payment for my participation, which I offer partly because I want to enjoy the benefits of improved free software, and this can only be done by participating in it. The rise of free software is unstoppable and as people seek more productivity and more free software as a result of the economic crisis, they will participate more in free software development, because there is no way to have free software without participation.
This is economic production, it is pure transfer and generation of wealth, and yet it is not properly counted in the GDP because it is not expressed in terms of money. That's absurd, and it is a result of humans paying so much attention to symbols (money is a symbol) that in the end they cannot discern the reality behind the symbols (the economy and real wealth). In fact, this inability of many humans to see reality without using symbols (or, to put it in another way, to perceive value in a symbol when there is no real value attached) is partly to blame for the current economic crisis: people are too stupid to discern real value and instead seek symbols, which sometimes give the impression of carrying lots of value when in fact they don't, and other times they give the impression of carrying too little value when in fact they carry a lot, but rarely their estimated value has the slighest relevance to the real value behind them (if there is any).
They never did. These people don't get it. No doubt they also believe that artists will stop creating art if they are not well paid...
-- "At Microsoft, quality is job 1.1" -- PC Magazine, Nov. 1994
not necessarily free of charge.....plzzzzz....
open src doesn't mean $0
it means free to know something
u can earn ur living by doing open src
but not as big monster in wall street?
http://slashdot.org/~SockDisclosure/journal/214377
In his wildest fucking dreams will open source disappear.
Guys like this just don't get it. The Natural force that drives Open Source is Altruism. It is not some man made construct like capitalism. Giving freely is a form of action that aids the whole groups survival. The strength of the group is ultimately more important than the individual.
This principal is counter intuitive when one just considers the individual, but the truth is that Altruism makes people happy, and ultimately people will tend to do what makes them happy.
So try as one may, this simple fact is impossible to explain away, and because of this I predict that this soothsayers rant will remain as worthless as those he wants to appease.
Participatory Governance : The only feasible option for a real democracy, where everyone really does have a say.
Recession may well mean that people want cash for their contributions. OP fails to recognise that recession will equally mean that there will be less cash to pay them with.
Imminent death of Open Source predicted? Again?! I thought we should have been through with this by the end of the 90s...
Well... guess some things really do never change...
OTOH obviously in the world of recession people will surely abandon all the free applications and switch to expensive commercial closed-source software.
When money's tight, nobody's gonna use what is free when you can have an expensive alternative, and everyone will pay big $$$ for upgrades instead of seeking a way to improve the source code themselves.
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After I read the entire article, I couldn't help thinking: "What a jerk!"
Anyway, I'll give you my point of view, and it's really common sense.
1. With the rise of unemployment, people have more spare time to contribute (as stated)
2. When companies have no money, they tend to shift to cheaper solutions as in "open source" (been there, done that), thus increasing the number of contributors
3. Open source or "free" technology doesn't aim to replaced "paid", but simply to provide an alternative (they will co-exist)
Finally this paragraph is really intriguing:
"So how will today's brutal economic climate change the Web 2.0 "free" economy? It will result in the rise of online media businesses that reward their contributors with cash"
So he mixes two completely different concepts, weird "Web 2.0" and "free" (or open source).
Worst, he says in a scenario of crisis, businesses will have money to reward their contributors?!?
No comments...
Well , just thought he looked like a miserable bastard in that picture.
Electronic Music Made Using Linux http://soundcloud.com/polyp
open source will not go away: it can't. I have source code and will give it away if anyone wants it.
Microsoft may go away (if we truly are the most intelligent species on earth, which is VERY debatable from where i stand, working in retail, but open source?
No.
There are too many people who have a vested interest in being great, wonderful people instead of chair throwing idiots, or (sarcasm) philanthropists (Bill Gates are you listening) to have open source go away.
soylentnews.org Go there to enjoy the people!
The government is not your daddy. Its purpose is not to raid your neighbors' wallets and give you their money.
Sorry, I've just read that sig one time too many to not say anything. If raiding your neighbors' wallets was your daddy's purpose, then your dad was an anti-social dick. I wonder how many "fiscal conservatives" owe their beginnings to similar circumstances..
...about whether people will start charging for sex.
Open-source did not create the economic crisis, nor will the elimination of it aleviate the economic crisis.
Politicians created the economic crisis, maybe we should try eliminating some of them?
Andrew Keen is a fucking idiot.
Much like Chris Cornell, who can only speak in Audioslave lyrics, Andrew Keen can only speak in non-sequiturs.
Want some proof?
Search YouTube for "The Truth According To Wikipedia". It's 50 minutes, but well worth watching, if only to learn that there are people as stupid as Andrew Keen.
Andrew Keen might have a point if the employed spent every waking hour slaving away at paid work and the unemployed spent every waking hour rooting through dirt and garbage to survive.
But he obviously didn't read Clay Shirky's post comparing the 200 billion hours Americans "spend" watching TV each year, equivalent to 2,000 Wikipedia-sized projects from scratch, every year.
=S
Open Source is a philosophy. Not everyone who adopts it does so because it's profitable.