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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.
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
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?
This guy is under the assumption everyone who works on open source technology is after financial gain. Very short sighted
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
Statistically speaking, the world doesn't end all that often.
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
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
Go get 'em, boy !!
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.
The minority that gives is usually enough.
factor 966971: 966971
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
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).
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
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.
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
"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:
That's funny because, according to economists, it was impossible for open source to exist in the first place...
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.
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
Comment removed based on user account deletion
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
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!
You are totally misinformed. Today, the blogs provide
more accurate information than the 4th Estate.
Except Slashdot of course, that posted this major FUD article.
You are being MICROattacked, from various angles, in a SOFT manner.
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.
In the coming economic hardships, no one will be willing to troll for free anymore!
DRM: Terminator crops for your mind!
I think they were aiming for a dupe and accidentally came out fair and balanced.
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?
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.
"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.