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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?
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.
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
This guy is under the assumption everyone who works on open source technology is after financial gain. Very short sighted
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.
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?
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.
A lot of users don't give them.
Jesus is coming -- look busy!
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
It seems we're getting dupes from a parallel SlashDot.
If that were true, this story would have a goatee.
Anybody want my mod points?
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.
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.
"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
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).
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.
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..."
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.
"Blogs shift power from broadcasters to individuals"... yes thats good, but advertisers are also using misinformation on blogs, to create so called Flogs. So how many popular blogs are really Flogs? ... However many it is, they are definately trying to game the system, to get popular blogs which are really just flogs.
Advertising + Blogs + advertisers_with_no_ethics = Flogs
http://adage.com/smallagency/post?article_id=113945
e.g. "Sony and agency Zipatoni have come under fire for one of their marketing tactics for the Sony PSP. Sony has added its name to a growing list of flogs [fake blogs] including McDonald's, WalMart and Lonely Girl 15, that are being called out by consumers. This isn't the first time Sony has been caught and questioned about the ethics of its marketing practices."
There are 10 kinds of people in the world... those who understand binary and those who don't.
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.
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:
Sounds a lot like astroturfing, but both of these techniques seem ridiculously easy to spot, and I suspect that's why we've already come up with a new name for them. Only the most gullible will be taken in by such scams. It's just a shame that there are so many gullible people using the internet these days.
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.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
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
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.
Yeah! The mainstream media is an incredibly good way to get clear, concise, and unbiased information...
Gaaaak!
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.
Well, give /. some credit for attempting to be "fair and balanced." FUD or not, I read this headline as a response to yesterday's article promoting exactly the opposite prediction from Red Hat's CEO http://linux.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/10/21/0116221 that the financial crisis will be a major boon for open source software. You may recall that Keen is the same fellow who was pimping his book on The Colbert Report a few months ago claiming that anything given away as free is worth absolutely nothing and that the internet will collapse from all the amateurs who are creating content. Check out his biography and you'll learn that, as an entrepreneur at the turn of the last century, he was a victim of the collapse of the tech bubble in 2000. I taste some very bitter grapes in his opinions about the web.
That statement also describes the CBS Evening News...
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
"Blogs shift power from broadcasters to individuals"... yes thats good, but advertisers are also using misinformation on blogs, to create so called Flogs.
So it's just like traditional media?
The author claims, among other things, that Mahalo will win out over Google. Mahalo has Google Adsense on the search result pages.
Blogs will never replace the normal news outlets and these "bloggers" are deluding themselves if they think they will.
So are you going to post a youtube video of yourself eating those words? Hell, Daily Kos is already a better source of information for political coverage and polling analysis than anywhere else, and they have the benefit of providing links to original sources. Between that, Slashdot, Science Blogs, and a few other niche sites the only time I have to hit a major media site is when there is breaking news that happened within the last few minutes. Your failure to adapt does not mean that those of us who have evolved are somehow flawed.
The world you experience is only a close approximation of reality.
For real?
For Realsies - Jack Donaghy
Now will someone kindly explain to me wtf a Mahalo is? I mean if it's going to survive the economic global meltdown crisis of the apocalypse 2008, you'd think a guy that spends most of his time online would of heard of it....
On the Oregon Cost born and raised, On the beach is where I spent most of my days
"It's all anecdotal, partisan, and un-researched crap."
That statement also describes the CBS Evening News...
And the rest of them, no?
:)
If all you have is a grenade, pretty soon every problem looks like a foxhole -- MightyYar
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. -
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.
Nope. You're assuming that the demand for software is static, and free software just eliminates some of what otherwise would have gone to paid developers. In reality, free software lowers the barriers for companies and increases the demand for developers. Say I have an idea for a website that I figure can make $100,000. If I can use LAMP and hire a developer to build the site for $75,000, I'll do it. But suppose you got your wish and free software magically vanishes. Now I'd have to pay $5000 for OS licenses, $20,000 for the database, and $10,000 for various other tools (web servers, development tools, compilers, etc). Oops, there goes my profit margin, and the developer never gets hired. Repeat this scenario enough and you've destroyed more jobs than you've saved.
How to solve most of our problems: 1.Lots of nuclear plants. 2.Cure aging.