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Are Bad Economic Times Good for Free Software?
Dog's_Breakfast writes "In a declining economy, software licenses become a luxury. Linux and the BSDs offer free alternatives. As the USA toys with the possibility of defaulting on its national debt (and thus risking economic collapse), the author wonders if this might not, at last, lead to 'The Year of the Linux Desktop.'"
I'd argue against that because most people do not save money. They spend everything they have. If they save $50 on an image editor, that money doesn't go in the bank... It goes to buy something else.
It doesn't restrict the flow or money at all... It only changes which company gets it.
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
Money not spent on software doesn't magically disappear.
That's the most broken windows thinking I've seen in a while.
I would argue though that it can be bad for the US economy, as software is a pretty big export.
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
Addendum to my previous comment: The point you're arguing is valid when consumer confidence is returning or already established; money saved in one area will indeed go towards other expenditures. However, when consumer confidence is non-existent (e.g. right now), that money isn't going anywhere other than a savings account, if not under a mattress (if the user doesn't feel burned enough by banks as-is).
Viable Slashdot alternatives: https://pipedot.org/ and http://soylentnews.org/
getting money to move from the average consumer is what's needed to drive an economy.
And you know what would do that? Burn their houses down. Anyone objects is basically a traitor to our glorious economy.
Insofar as software licenses are economically efficient and the proceeds of license sales fall upon as many people as possible you could be right. But if software licenses simply impose economic rent and the lions share of the revenues accrue to a few large corporations, which proceed to put the money in their checking account, its not so clear.
Open-source can also stimulate economic activity through sales of support contracts, new equipment, etc. What a recession does is it keeps people where they are, regardless of the sort of license they have -- they know what they have, they don't want to spend money learning something new, and the license they bought two years ago is still just as good today as it was when they were rich.
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
FOSS, as advantageous as it is in value (in many cases) contributes against the velocity of money by allowing consumers to pocket money which would otherwise "move" as a result of bundled software licenses.
That's the most broken windows thinking I've seen in a while.
When is Windows thinking not broken?
Seriously Slashdot, like I even need to say this. Most everyone I know uses either Ubuntu or Debian and a few others use Redhat and the like. The rest of the people I know use a Mac. So guess what? We're already there, Debian "just worked" on my netbook. All devices. I don't even have to say "Blah blah Andrioid" because Linux is everywhere. Sometimes I hear about people, usually through the Internet, who use Hotmail and complain about computer viruses all the time. These people shovel money at anything and have no idea what is going on. To these people the concept of TCO does not exist.
In the midst of an economic crisis the more expensive Mac platform enjoys a sharp increase in market share. I'd say the proposition is false, price is not the primary driver of operating system selection.
Perhaps FOSS apps have some advantage but Mac OS X is unix based so many run as well on Mac as they do under Linux. Some FOSS apps also have windows ports. So there does not seem to be a real economic driver for Linux on the desktop via FOSS apps either.
Ah the year of the linux desktop...been hearing that for a while.
Free software is mainly useful when you are implementing large quatities of things (e.g. server farms or point of sale terminals or generic desktops for interchangable worker bees. Also it's fantastic for sharing things to other people whoo can't be bothered to buy, say Matlab, to run your stupid script. that's why it gets so much play in acadamia.
but everyone else values their time and does not have the skill to deal with all the flexibility and variety Linux has. Google, apple and microsoft spend a lot making it easy to use and assuring compatibility (well not google yet). Linux by it's nature is untamed. it's a lynx not a kitten. Nothing wrong with being a lynx, but they are never going to be housebroken.
shooting to be a desktop environment for the masses is trying to be the wrong thing.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Great for linux? Maybe. But the kind of people who would sit around collecting unemployment for years are the kind of people who use Internet Explorer, if you catch my drift. (For those of you who didn't catch my drift, you use Internet Explorer and have a low IQ).
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
Moving money around as a way to grow the economy is overrated. The best way to grow is to actually produce something useful.
Do we need to carry on that "risk of default"-bullshit? The US never were in any economical risk of default, given their top credit rating. Debt/GDP ratio has been worse in history and is worse in countries working just fine right now. The only risk ever was from the obstruction tactics of the tea party - and even if they kept it up, it would not have lead to a default in the strict sense. It might still lead to a downgrading of credit rating, as they amply demonstrated that a significantly influential group of the US political system can't be expected to act as adults these days - which scares off potential sources of credit.
Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.
People not spending money on commercial software doesn't mean that money just up and dissapears from the economy. Those people use that money for daily life necessities like food, utilities and transorrtation so the money goes back into the system but is taken throuhg a different industry.
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
With all of the explosion of micro pc's (aka smartphones and tablets becoming prevalent) I don't see linux as gaining in the desktop arena much. But handhelds based upon linux hold great promise. They will come to dominate most of the market I believe. Android phones and tablets will become a large chunk of the tech people use and not desktops. Many of the older people I know are going for a tablet and a smartphone and not bothering with the whole PC upgrade anymore. Most of what they need to do can easily be accomplished using a tablet with much less headache. They don't have to call someone everytime they can't figure something out since there is nothing really to figure out.
Here's the thing, though. If someone saves $100 on a license for Windows, that's $100 that they can spend somewhere else. If there's one thing that stands out about the American economy as a whole, it's the inability for a large number of people to save money. That $100 is just going to be spent somewhere else. In some cases the ability to use FOSS will allow people to improve their business, where they might not have been able to do otherwise. The money that they can potentially save with FOSS products, whether it's an OS, web server, or productivity software can go towards other parts of the business.
The ability to do things in a more cost-effective manner is what drives business as a whole forward. No one is sitting around crying about the woes of the blacksmith whose enterprise was destroyed with the advent of the automobile. We're too busy using our cars and other vehicles to enhance our own lives and make things which were impossible before the automobile, e.g. long commutes, largely trivial. If Microsoft's business model is less viable, I won't lose any sleep over it. Either than can adopt, or die at the feet of progress. If they don't, the world in one hundred years will care no more than we care about the buggy makers of a hundred years past.
Yeah, let's break all the Windows.
Rethinking email
Wait, you're saying we can't grow the economy by just selling each other tulip bulbs?
Open-source can also stimulate economic activity through sales of support contracts, new equipment, etc. What a recession does is it keeps people where they are, regardless of the sort of license they have -- they know what they have, they don't want to spend money learning something new, and the license they bought two years ago is still just as good today as it was when they were rich.
Open Source actually stimulates economic activity inherently - it makes people more productive. If people are using open source software, it (in most cases) is doing something that they want done, thus freeing up their time for other pursuits, or allowing them to be more productive in the same amount of time.
Don't be ridiculous; I make very important websites with my college education!
"velocity of money"? You're really off track.
Software is like ice. I wrote, in 2003: "Information technology, likewise, is an essential part of todays' business world. In many ways, the IT systems of the last decades resemble natural ice: an incredibly valuable material hacked out with curious cutting tools by a small band of rugged adventurers, transported with great care to distant places, and mainly catering to the richest consumers only. Like ice, information technology has no basic cost: no expensive raw materials, no inherent limits on production. Ice is simply the solid form of one abundant matter, and information technology is a solid form another abundant matter, namely the human intellect."
When ice is free, you enable huge industries on top of it. Same with software. Free software underlies the Internet, for one thing. Velocity of money? No, it's about velocity of knowledge, freedom of the market, lower friction, and overall more wealth.
My blog
Pun intended.
You implicitly assume the cost of switching is zero. It's very much not in any business of moderate or greater size, even if you assume the time of your employees doesn't cost you anything (which it does). It's not even low.
Free Software effect on the economy isn't that straight forward. What you loose in money flow you gain in your business ability to grow, and expand.
What free software did do, is make it hard for Software Companies to product new Software. Not all software business models work on the RMS Approved way of making money with Free Software. If your product is easy to use yet powerful, consulting services is out of the question, If your product is small in size, charging for shipping and material doesn't work as well. Some software business will work best if they focus on building the software and someone pays money for the right to use it. But the problem with free software alternatives is that these companies will need come up with a huge advantage over the alternative for it to succeed.
But as I said before that is too simplistic of a view... Because such software companies can alter their program to be one of those newfangled "Cloud" programs where people will just pay for the rights to use it, with using existing free software they can do this much more quickly.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
What about all those programmers working at MS and Apple? I dare say they are spending all their paychecks on coke and hookers. Okay, maybe Pepsi and Cheetos.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
A) Those licenses for commercial software are paid for, and if a company doesn't have the money to purchase new software licenses they probably don't have the money for new hardware.
B) Most of the licenses that I've dealt with allow the license to be transfered from one machine to another, at least within an organization and particularly for the types of software that FLOSS can replace. So if a new machine is purchased and an old one is retired, the license is still paid for.
C) If there is an economic crunch, chances are that the businesses are retaining current staffing levels (if they aren't actually going down). So the number of licenses required will stay the same, if not decline. Again, everything is paid for.
D) Retraining and rolling out an entirely different system will cost money. I highly doubt that they would save any money on managing their systems either, since Microsoft provides fairly extensive management tools (many of which I haven't seen the likes of under Linux).
For consumers, (A) and (B) still apply.
Open-source can also stimulate economic activity through sales of support contracts, new equipment, etc.
FOSS has largely cannibalized the support contracts of traditional Unix vendors and displaced the proprietary versions of Unix formerly used on new equipment. FOSS did not really generate new economic activity, it commoditized formerly premium priced services. Its questionable whether commodity based pricing has increased economic activity, companies at the low end would probably have purchased a virtual SunOS host rather than a virtual Linux host. Now for hobbyists FOSS has been a great boon, but I'm not sure their usage translates into much economic activity.
Exactly. The only ones who directly benefit from a higher "velocity of money" are the tax-collectors, as taxes are imposed whenever money changes hands regardless of whether the exchange is productive. Everyone else benefits most from saving their money until they can make a productive trade, not from compulsively spending it as quickly as possible.
"The state is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else." - Bastiat
because linux is only free if your time is worthless.
And Windows is only $169 per license if your time is even more worthless. The constant reimaging, the futzing about with intentionally hidden design features, the 3rd party software that doesn't update automatically with OS updates (where the OSS replacement of said software is in the repos). Linux/Unix admins are only paid more because we have esoteric knowledge. Windows admins do a lot more work.
Absolutely.
When the economy collapses, the first thing everyone will do is run out to become a computer expert so they can install and run linux. Corporations will replace their entire IT staff with people who know linux, and the average person on the street will suddenly realize that what they really need to do to cope with a failed economy is LEARN A NEW OPERATING SYSTEM!
Or, you know, people might just keep using what they're using while they hope things get better. Because that will leave them time to work enough jobs to buy food.
I would argue, that as opposed to going into a bank account, money saved by most consumers is going into debt payoff. I know in my family (and several of my friends/kids' school families) this is the case. Skimped expenses are being used to build some infrastructure (home repairs, improvements, a garden, etc.) and the rest is being sent in to creditors.
I am very rusty on my econ 101, but IIRC (likely not) debt paydown is not considered savings (though has a similar result on the overall balance sheet).
whois gawk date unzip strip find touch finger mount join nice man top fsck grep eject more yes exit umount sleep dump
Why another bank?
Why not hold up a bank and tell the teller: now zero my debt balance and no one gets hurt.
(obviously a stupid criminal, but largely those that walk in to hold up a bank fit that description).
Wasn't there a guy just recently that "robbed" a bank of $20 and waited for the cops or something?
-nB
whois gawk date unzip strip find touch finger mount join nice man top fsck grep eject more yes exit umount sleep dump
Just in case people don't get the reference: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window
Except for ending slavery, the Nazis, communism, & securing American independence, war has never solved anything.
ignorant. Really, you can't because they don't want to listen to something which says they've been doing it wrong all these years. And then there is the "nobody ever gets fired for choosing Microsoft" mantra and the desire to blend in so you're not a target for the layoff. So no, you'll only see a small uptick in OSS in a down economy and what you'll probably see is more piracy and/or longer refresh cycles. IMO
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
Wasn't there a guy just recently that "robbed" a bank of $20 and waited for the cops or something?
-nB
I think you mean this guy. He robbed the bank for $1 and surrendered, in order to get free health care in prison.
Jokes aside, the idea that robbing banks can help the economy sounds suspiciously like the broken window fallacy.
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
The only ones who directly benefit from a higher "velocity of money" are the tax-collectors
And the financial services sector.
I don't always use unix-like operating systems; but when I do, I prefer FreeBSD.
There's a saying I've seen on the Internet that is very true to enterprise Linux support "Linux is only free if your time is worthless." I find it to be quite true.
We do multi-OS support where I work (all integrated) and Linux is one of them. It works fine, we've got it integrated in to our central system along with Windows, Solaris, and OS-X, it is managed all that jazz.
However what I find is that making Linux work is a lot more labour intensive than Windows or OS-X (don't get me started on the hell that is Solaris, it is going away soon hopefully). Our Linux lead has to spend a lot of time hacking around to get things working as they need to, and it involves a fair bit of programming (which is not the same skillset as systems administration). There usually isn't any money involved in getting the tools, just a lot of staff time, and thus money there, spent making it work as it should.
A counterpoint to that would be OS-X. It's built in enterprise support was... Lacking to say the least and the only real option was to buy a program to fix it. However that money spent was all it took, once we had the program it is more or less zero effort to get the systems joined up and working. Little in the way of staff time, but no small chunk of change in terms of software to make it happen, never mind the high cost of the systems themselves.
I'm not pointing to either as being the right way or better or anything, just saying that you have to consider time spent on Linux as a real cost. If you have to have more people to work on it, and those people need more skills, and they spend more time to make it work, those costs have to be factored in. You can't point to licensing cost savings and say "See! We spend so much less!"
It could well be worth it, but be honest about the costs. Something Windows does have going for it is good enterprise support. Their tools are great, anyone who hates on Active Directory for authentication/management has never seen it handle a large organization and do so easily and well. You do pay for it, but it can be worth it.
Fanboys like to brag about 10% marketshare and they have a platform that was fully formed 7 years before the first line of the Linux kernel was written. Apple also effectively had a 10 year head start on Microsoft in terms of ease of use technology. Apple was competing against MS-DOS with a far better system.
"fracturing" has nothing to do with anything. PCs and Android phones are a great counterexample.
Market success is about marketing success. You have superbowl ads, effective TV ads, and your own stores.
Despite all of this, the best that Apple fanboys can brag about is finally breaking the 10% mark and how it's been 20 years coming.
Torpedoed by what Microsoft had to offer in 1991...
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
So what is really happening? It's called momentum. Microsoft has trained users over the past decades to accept inferior usability and engineering - not necessarily to Linux in many aspects, but to various alternatives that existed over the years - as the industry standard. People simply refuse to learn how to use an OSX or Linux desktop, the same way they do not accept a new spreadsheet software unless it's called Excel (even if it is totally different from the previous version - they simply trust it!). The iPod and IPad were not the first products in their respective markets by far, but people weren't trained to one particular look & feel (physically and regarding the UI), so Apple had a chance to succeed and used it well. Now it's up to Apple to establish an industry standard, at least for smartphones and tablets and make use of the momentum they're gaining over the next 10+ years to dominate the market...
Whether you like it or not, both engineering and usabilty/asthetics are less important than people's habits. If you are old enough to remember the home computer platform wars, you'll know ...
"I love my job, but I hate talking to people like you" (Freddie Mercury)
Products are services are wealth, not money. As to 'greedy pig wanting more' - those are people who start businesses and create products and services, well, outside of Free software, if they are looking for profit.
Search for profit is by far the biggest motivator that increased the wealth of people on this planet most when compare to any other motivator, and 'greedy pigs' are the people who are looking for profit.
You can't handle the truth.
You mean like the next version of msoffice that requires retraining the entire company?
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Actually, this depends heavily on the political climate. In most countries, there was a time of two or three decades after the Second World War when wealth flowed downwards overall. It was a slow movement to be sure, but when you look at indicators like inequality, or the share of national income that goes towards wages (as opposed to rents) the trend was clearly in favor of the "small guy".
Then the politics changed, and for the last few decades we have seen the same movement but in reverse.
What this boils down to is that there is nothing inevitable about a flow upward. It comes down to political choice - though one thing that I would agree with is that a government that does not enforce strong regulations tends to favor flows that go upwards.
I'd argue that people do not save money because there is no point in saving something that is constantly being debased and inflated and devalued.
Definition of money is store of value, unit of account and medium of exchange. They removed one important aspect of it: store of value with fiat that is backed by nothing, thus people do not save.
I know I don't save fiat, I spend it immediately and to store value I buy metals and mining stocks, which from my POV counts as savings (for metals) and investment (for stocks).
People do have savings when money is not being destroyed by the government. Savings are what makes credit possible.
Credit is not supposed to come out of thin air and printing presses. Eventually somebody must produce something and have the value of that production stored and not spent, which then makes this value transferable and available as credit for for investment.
So from my POV, having a product that is of low cost or even, as in case with free/Free software can be had without cost of any license is a good thing, as it allows building up more savings, which can be used for investment, which is the only legitimate way to improve the economy.
You can't handle the truth.
Imagine you have a small nation with carpenters. They build stuff out of trees. Trees become a scarce resource and up pops a thriving tree farming industry. You know, planting and protecting trees.
Then, magic of magic, someone finds a convenient mountain pass. Right next door. On the other side of a small mountain is a literal forest of trees. Anyone can now get lumber. All they have to do is go get it. The tree planting industry tanks, and a few druids are out of business.
And yet the carpenters have plenty of material to work with, people have cheaper houses, cheaper goods, and a new (if smaller) industry of trail guides.
You are arguing to close the mountain pass, entrench the middle-men, and force everyone to support a worthless industry.
In short, your metrics are lieing to you. You can't trust them to show you the whole picture. "Money velocity" is just a simplification of an aspect of a very complex system that you don't have a good grasp of. Work on that.
Do we need to carry on that "risk of default"-bullshit? The US never were in any economical risk of default, given their top credit rating. Debt/GDP ratio has been worse in history and is worse in countries working just fine right now.
You can go even further. There is never any economical risk of default for a government that issues its own currency and only issues debt that is denominated in that currency. In fact, it is even misleading to think of US government bonds as debt. It's more like a savings account (as opposed to the reserve accounts at the Fed, which are like checking accounts). You can read more about the basic observations of Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) here. Debt/GDP ratios or anything like that really don't matter: the US government cannot go bankrupt.
(Note that of course, hypothetically, the US$ as a currency could be rejected by the US citizens, in which case the government would still be solvent, it just couldn't buy anything with its US$. However, then we're talking about what causes hyperinflation, and some insight into that can be found here)
The only possibility has ever been that the government voluntarily defaults (in the current case, due to the craziness of the Tea Party types).
By "don't want' I mean are socially regressive in some form or another (morally). We tried to ban alcohol, that didn't work out so well, and only produced gangs that supported the now illegal substance. We've made the same mistake over and over again with drugs and prostitution. The solution is not to make things like that illegal, but rather to tax them.
We have a great representative of this in cigarettes, where we've taxed them to a level that now is starting to create its own blackmarket. The tax revenue is diminishing on them. Which is why you don't see people wanting to raise the taxes any more, because the government already makes more on cigarettes than the tobacco companies.
Similar is Gasoline. Government makes more than Big Oil. IF we learned these lessons, why can't we apply them? Because all the prudes out there would rather deal with crime than make those who consume things pay taxes. I don't get it.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
However, wealth (the non-abundant variety) always ultimately flows upward. It loops downward a lot, but the net effect over time is that more and more wealth gets concentrated among smaller and smaller groups of people. Such movement is not indefinitely sustainable, so all economies collapse eventually.
Time series over the gini income coefficient (higher number means the rich are richer, so to speak) do not indicate this. At least, eyeballing the graphs does not reveal any trends for me. I know, this is just the income.. it would be nice if someone would care to do the graphs for the gini coefficent of the wealth directly.
Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by rulers as useful.
In that case you might as well give the money direct to the people the glaziers would have given it to.
Same stimulus effect, less broken glass.
That's retarded. You might as well pay them to sit on their butts all day. In fact, it'd be better - no wear and tear on the shovels.
Instead of doing equal and opposite actions with no net effect, it makes sense to employ people on useful public works. Dig twice as many ditches in places where they're needed, and then don't fill them in.
I don't think you totally grok the broken window fallacy. Don't think about money, think about things.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."