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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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
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.
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
n/t
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
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.
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.
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
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.........