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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."
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.
Ok, you have a point. It's just that I hear this sort of thing all the time.
"Why would you do all that work and then give it away?"
For me, as soon as money enters the picture, the fun is (mostly) gone; with money comes responsibility, whoever is providing the money buys the right to demand answers and project deadlines. It's no longer "because I enjoy doing it", but "because he tells me to".
I think he either just doesn't understand this concept, or he ignores it, because frankly, it makes *him* completely irrelevant. It must be very frustrating, being an economist, and people suddenly start doing stuff that's not about money.
He conveniently forgets that a lot of people who contribute to OSS aren't professional programmers during working hours, he is completely ignorant to the fact that there are people who know how to write computer software *outside of the US* (gosh!).
Besides, WTF does Myspace have to do with OSS?
If that is the case then how did the open source projects come to exist in the first place? Matter of observation I saw a boom in open source projects after the dotcom bubble burst and even open source projects that existed before the collapse even got even more contributions after that. I certainly saw better progress from kernel development to KDE maturity.
Yeah I know... I know... You were just showing the other side of the ever fake coin. ;)
This space is not for rent.
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.