An idiot's view of open source

Idiot's Guide to Open Source

Really, all we have to do is wait and see what happens. Perhaps Mr. Keene is correct. I don't know enough about economics to say with any confidence. I have to say that ordinary common sense seems to suggest that during an economic "downturn", people are going to be more eager to use free stuff.

Mr. Keene seems to blame the economy on open source, which is probably not what caused the problems. My wild guess would be that poor leadership in the US, rapacious corporations, insane wars, and lack of regulation had more to do with it than a few programmers writing programs for the joy of it.

But we'll see whether Mr. Keene's predictions are borne out.

Economy is about to "Give Open-Source a Good Thumping"

Andrew, you are full of some smelly substance.

Several byproducts of high unemployment are:

Job loss causes individuals to start their own businesses.

Some people on the dole (unemployment) find ways to supplement their unemployment with cash jobs.

Quite a bit of volunteer work is done half days, while the other half day is dedicated to the job search.

People scale back their spending, leading to new interests in free software. (or negatively, piracy). One can live without video rentals twice a week.

Households begin to cook meals, instead of eating out. It's tough on restaurents, but it is a necessity in order to make ends meet.

Until the economy recovers, some companies implement job-sharing, whereby a half salary is better then none.

My bottom line is that Andrew has it wrong. My experience when unemployment hit 8% (unofficially 12%) in my country was that there were no breadlines, people found ways to make expenses, and families pooled resources to help each other out and to wait out the depression.

The big winner in this will be Open Source.

Governments will initiate billions of dollars of expenses for public works. Public works create jobs, and that kick-starts the economy.

Do realize, that Andrew's negative view is that of continental United States. The world no longer relies on the USA. Life will go on... People may actually leave the USA for greener pastures, and there are many greener pastures.

The History of Denial

When Copernicus suggested that the Earth revolves around the Sun, apologists for the Catholic Church issued denials much as Mr. Keen's. Time and reality eclipsed such ignorant drivel, as they will Mr. Keen's.

Not as simple as that...

Microsoft DNA is its operating system, then comes office and the rest of the microsoft vast ecosystem.
They do not see any other way, and losing grips on this milking cow is something they would probably consider laughable at best, suicide at worst.

I think it is fair to say that Microsoft does a decent job. Naturally, there is always room for criticism, as anybody that is busy *making things* would always get things wrong, this way or another. So perhaps the attacks on Microsoft are something beyond technical criticism.

Now, the corporates you mentioned, most of them don't sell operating systems (well, IBM sells its proprietary OS's, Sun its proprietary Solaris) - they do business in other ways. Also, RedHat which probably does most of its revenue in the service arena (right?) is genetically different from Microsoft which does its profits from selling licenses to use its s/w.
There is also a tendency of large corporations to bunch up as a force against Microsoft, not necessarily due to altruistic causes, but probably they want their piece of Microsoft big pie of OS/Office/Other.

Even more: Microsoft makes a considerable effort to advance its system - good or bad is a matter of judgment and point of view, but, they seem to succeed, at least partially, and earn quite a big sum of money along the way.

I guess the deal with open-source is that sharing knowledge is better for the common good, and it has its benefits in other areas, which are not accounted for in terms of hard cash in the next quarter: I guess that good spirit is good (for) business. I gather Microsoft would get that, eventually, or they would diminish.

Almost had me reaching

Ya almost had me reaching for the trigger at first - no free developers, indeed - but good writeup. ;) There is SO much less of the "developing to scratch an itch" now than there was just half a decade ago. Now, like you say, Linux is indeed being written in a large part by corporate developers looking to improve a solution.

The flip side is, to be clear, NO ONE owns GNU/Linux in its entirety, a very good thing so that no one would be left out in the cold if one or more developers decide they want to do something else. Plus, our favorite whipping boy can't decide to throw some cash at someone to make Linux go away.

Ubuntu World-Wide

The only reason Ubuntu, the free one on the net, didn't catch on in the U.S. so far, is American kids were being fed candy-coated Windows pablum at school and their folks had lots of disposable cash to "pay off" the Microsoft ransoms. Today; World Markets crashed, Americans were foreclosed, fortunes were lost on the stock markets, layoffs are happening, OPEC raised the price of oil, God turned his back on a sinful America, and we are now "Third World" - We will now, out of necessity turn to Ubuntu, the free one on the net, in droves! We cannot afford the newer high- power computers required to run the "Vista" experiment, never mind the software costs, and are searching for low cost boxes with Ubuntu OS as we speak! It is all over the net now! Ubuntu and the various Linux systems are the cheaper, affordable, better running alternative, and we can revive older used computers for free using it, a boon for the very poor!

Exactly!

I think your summary of how opensource softwares are developed is spot on. It's not about idealistic 'give my work away for free' but practical issues with progressively large software packages. Sharing progress, where everyone benefits, is just common sense.

It's international!

I blinked twice when reading that Linux is made by corporate America. Corporate I can accept, mostly, but America?
Come on! Linux is an international thing. No, it is not one of those things that America can boast of. Linus is from Finland, Ubuntu is from South Africa, Suse is from Germany and Mandrake from France.
And corporate only came in when there was a profit to be made. Not that I count that as a bad reason, but for sure it means that they didn't make Linux. They were simply not the first.