Open Source is not about free labor
October 23rd, 2008 | Published in oss | 2 Comments
Tons of people still think opensource software is created by hobbyists (hackers) working for free from home. In Economy to Give Open-Source a good Thumping Andrew Keen argues that the upcoming economic downturn will make programmers think twice about working for free and this might hurt open source.
In my opinion he really doesn’t understand how open source works. To understand Open Source you have to understand the impact of the internet, and you have to understand the origins of Web 2.0. Internet has made worldwide collaboration possible. We’ve seen the effect this has on information and knowledge as is explained in books like The Wisdom of the crowds and The long tail.
The internet enables everybody to collaborate. The internet also enables you to aggregate every little effort. The result may be a big valuable thing.
Another thing you have to understand is that companies do a lot of stuff that isn’t really core business, but still has to be done, otherwise the core business doesn’t get done. So they’re paying for work that doesn’t directly result in something that can be sold.
What the internet does, is that it enables all these companies to work together on things that aren’t core business. And by collaborating they lower their costs, but together they are creating something of value.
A company may for example sell devices. These devices need an operating system, and it’s valuable for the company to make small changes to the operating system, so that their devices are improved. But creating a complete operating system is more costly that modifying an existing operating system.
Or a company may be in the business of selling cpu’s and it wants their customers to take advantage of some new features in these cpu’s. Just by improving an existing operating system a little bit they may achieve this goal.
Or a company may be in the business of selling databases. And by improving an existing operating system they improve the performance of their database.
Why create your own webserver as part of your application server when you can take an existing one, and slightly improve it?
Collaboration on non core efforts allows companies to seriously cut costs. This is made possible by the internet. But this collaboration is only possible if the code is available. That’s why Open Source is saving companies money. Even if they pay for the development of it.
October 24th, 2008 at 9:23 am (#)
For project Gutenberg, a large team of volunteers happily collaborate to republish out-of-copyright works of literature. They do this mainly because it is fun, and partly because the results help everybody. A lot of the volunteers here are not richt, but as long as they have time at hand, and can pay their connectivity bills, they will be coming.
For free software, it is pure market economics–traditional market economy holds that prices will drop down to a production cost plus a reasonable margin. For commodity software, this means that even a $100 million OS will cost a few dollars for each copy, as their are so many millions of user to share the cost. The model that makes that price level possible is free software.
Consider you are a company that has a customer for a certain feature. There are two ways you could build that feature: one build it from free software, or build it from proprietary software. Once there is a critical mass of free software, it becomes so much cheaper to use that critical mass than the alternative, that the price of free software (returning your feature to the community) makes economical sense. You still can sell the development of that new feature to the customer who needs it–turning the software industry into the service oriented industry it is supposed to be….
All this transcends the total mess the kleptocrats and their cronies have made of the financial system.
October 31st, 2008 at 1:20 pm (#)
[...] zijn, maar toch. Ik denk dat het artikel wat te kort door de bocht is en kan me beter vinden in deze reactie van Andrej Koelewijn: het gaat er niet om dat hobbyisten gratis dingen doen, open source is voor [...]