> Web 2.0 has come with Bubble 2.0. It's a lot less dramatic than the
> first, but no one still has any damned idea how YouTube is going to
> make a buck.
It is probably my fault for putting "IPO" in the subject line, but conflating dot.com bubbles and open source software development is just plain wrong.
I don't know enough about the company MySQL ABB to be able to form an opinion as to whether or not it should turn to the stock market for capitalization but even a cursory glance at the story should make evident that this is not some jazzy "Web 2.0" startup built largely on air, but an established company that develops a rather boring product, a database system, which just happens to serve as a platform for a bazillion or so websites, including some really huge ones like Wikipedia. It appears to have a genuine revenue stream, ten thousand or so companies which pay a few thousand dollars a year for support.
What is so flaky about this? Where is the bubble? Red Hat, another open source software company, had an IPO during the dot.com era and it is still in business, flourishing even; it makes money and also returns something to the community in the form of improvements to Linux which anyone is free to use (and many do). As a whole, the OSS community is partly driven by volunteers, which may limit its applicability to the wider world, but neither is it solely the province of pimply geeks living in their parents' basements.
I realize that software development is but a small part of total US economy, and one simply cannot apply the open source model to a business like WalMart. But it is nonetheless worth studying because it tempers one of the most egregious aspect of contemporary capitalism, and that is the stranglehold a few powerful corporations have in markets they dominate. A company like Red Hat can make lots of dough selling its services, but if ever it were to claim proprietary interest in the source code and/or make decisions that weren't in the public good (alas rather narrowly defined in this context), people could and would quickly jump ship. This issue is all the more germane given the truly onerous Digital RIghts Management (DRM) features of Vista, which are described in all their gory detail in the article which Dwayne alluded to in another thread earlier today.
It is not going to happen anytime soon, but imagine the it was decreed in the US that all electronic voting systems should be open-source. Diebold et al would scream bloody murder, but we can now point to evidence that can be a viable economic model. They could make money while answering to the greater public good, i.e., transparency.
Instead of making snarky comments about free toasters and other ephemera, I would hope the lefties on this list would take a closer look at OSS as being an useful example of how economic life can be organized (slightly) differently. But few people here seem to "get it", Dwayne, Ravi, maybe others, and of course Chuck, who rightly recognizes in it aspects of anarchism.
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Colin Brace
Amsterdam