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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."
Wait...I thought the Economic Crisis was GOOD for open source?
http://linux.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/10/21/0116221
Just like.... 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?
The latest U.S. News & World Report appears to claim this recession is deeper than the post-dot-com recession. If you want page numbers, I can dig them up when I get home.
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.
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.
Wasn't it just the other day that Red Hat announced they were feeling just fine and dandy in this economic crisis, as many companies are looking to lower their expenses by going open source?
Ignore this signature. By order.
> Some men just want to watch the world burn.
Others just want to bring marshmallows.
boycott slashdot February 10th - 17th check out: altSlashdot.org
I use open source code exclusively for all of of the projects I'm involved in at work. When the code doesn't do what I want it to do, I patch it and contribute the patch. In a few cases, I've contributed enough that I've been made a committer on the relevant projects.
This is how open-source software works; we're all using it out of self-interest, and contributing our changes in the interest that they be merged with the mainline codebase so that we don't have to maintain a fork. And so the mainline code gets better.
Everyone has different use cases, so everyone contributes to whatever part of the system they personally need. When those use cases overlap, the code in the intersection gets polished by all the interested parties.