观点：经济衰退会重击开源软件及Web2.0
[img=125,125]http://img.lightreading.com/internetevolution/AndrewKeen.gif[/img]Economy to Give Open-Source a Good Thumping
Written by Andrew Keen
10/21/2008
[url=http://www.internetevolution.com/author.asp?section_id=556&doc_id=166342]http://www.internetevolution.com ... d=556&doc_id=166342[/url]
When we think of the Great Depression, we imagine long lines of gaunt men, caps in hand, waiting for soup handouts. The equivalent photos of today's economic hard times -- displayed for free, of course, on Flickr -- may be represented by images of unemployed people in front of their computers cheerfully donating their labor to Wikipedia.
Unfortunately, there is no doubt that a lot of Americans are suddenly going to have a lot of extra time on their hands to donate their labor for free. Unemployment in America is already at a five-year high of 6.1 percent, with leading economists like 2008's Nobel Prize winner Paul Krugman predicting that it will be "certain" to rise to 7 percent and "quite possibly" to 8 percent as the depressing economic implications of the Wall Street financial meltdown crawl up Main Street. As Krugman wrote, with unvarnished Hobbesian honesty, in The New York Times earlier this month, "All signs point to an economic slump that will be nasty, brutish -- and long."
So much for the good news. Hundreds of thousands, and perhaps millions, of newly redundant Americans will have nothing to do all day except contribute to wikis or become citizen journalists or "work" on their Facebook or MySpace pages. In an America where one in 10 adults are out of work, will Wired editor-in-chief Chris Anderson's free economic model revolutionize the nature of work? Is $0.00 really the future of labor in an age of mass unemployment?
Of course not. One of the very few positive consequences of the current financial miasma will be a sharp cultural shift in our attitude toward the economic value of our labor. Mass unemployment and a deep economic recession comprise the most effective antidote to the utopian ideals of open-source radicals. The altruistic ideal of giving away one's labor for free appeared credible in the fat summer of the Web 2.0 boom when social-media startups hung from trees, Facebook was valued at $15 billion, and VCs queued up to fund revenue-less "businesses" like Twitter. But as we contemplate the world post-bailout, when economic reality once again bites, only Silicon Valley’s wealthiest technologists can even consider the luxury of donating their labor to the latest fashionable, online, open-source project.
In his best-selling book, Predictably Irrational, MIT behavorial economist Dan Ariely suggests that most of us are irrational when it comes to determining the value of our labor. I’m not sure. I may not have Ariely’s grasp of behavorial economics, but I’m pretty sure, if not certain, that the idea of free labor will suddenly become profoundly unpalatable to someone faced with their house being repossessed or their kids going hungry. Being paid to work is intuitive to the human condition; it represents our most elemental sense of justice.
So how will today's brutal economic climate change the Web 2.0 "free" economy? It will result in the rise of online media businesses that reward their contributors with cash; it will mean the success of Knol over Wikipedia, Mahalo over Google (Nasdaq: GOOG), TheAtlantic.com over the HuffingtonPost.com, iTunes over MySpace, Hulu over YouTube Inc. , Playboy.com over Voyeurweb.com, TechCrunch over the blogosphere, CNN’s professional journalism over CNN’s iReporter citizen-journalism... 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. "Free" doesn’t fill anyone’s belly; it doesn’t warm anyone up.
When, in 50 years time, the definitive histories of the Web 2.0 epoch are written, historians will look back at the open-source mania between 2000 and 2008 with a mixture of incredulity and amusement. How could tens of thousands of people have donated their knowledge to Wikipedia or the blogosphere for free? What was it about the Internet that made so many of us irrational about our economic value? It was a "mania," these mid-21st-century historians will explain, like the Dutch Tulip mania of the 1630s or South Sea Bubble of 1720 -- a mania that ended with the great crash of October 2008.
— Andrew Keen, Silicon Valley author, broadcaster, and entrepreneur
[[i] 本帖最后由 Joe 于 2008-10-24 16:52 编辑 [/i]] 给个简单的中文总结吧，太长懒得看。 我估计他的意思说，经济萧条，开源资助资金没了。那些开发人员没饭吃了，他们得赚钱。谁还开源啊。肚子都添不饱。:lol 开源模式让人觉得很不可思议，一方面是软件开发人员以开源的方式砸掉自己的饭碗，另一方面他们又要从别人那里得到资助才能生存，那他们何必要砸掉自己的饭碗呢
回复 4楼 winsoft 的帖子
一直觉得程序员太傻，自己砸自己饭碗，然后成就几个鼓吹的人的名声，被忽悠了还乐此不疲。希望这篇文章写对了，经济萧条让这些人清醒。 开源成就了XILI。同意一楼的观点
:lol [quote]原帖由 [i]dagongyx[/i] 于 2008-11-22 14:25 发表 [url=http://www.cnsw.org/bbs/redirect.php?goto=findpost&pid=420212&ptid=85522][img]http://www.cnsw.org/bbs/images/common/back.gif[/img][/url][/quote]
:victory: 真正能给开源项目贡献代码的大牛们大多已经脱离了养家糊口的阶段，有了一定的技术积累和经济基础。但是在一个公司或者组织里面个人的兴趣和想法很难得到发挥，因此这些人就会建立或参与一些开源项目来做一些在工作中无法做到的事情。 开源其实也是一种商业模式吧，
开源最终是要带来收益的，可以是金钱，也可以是品牌提升，这就是投资方或大公司愿意养人的原因吧
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