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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
Most large businesses are just as dumb as government organisations - you just don't get to hear about most of it.
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.