Two fairly old papers on the economics of open source. The news recently has been that open source allows companies to bring in better, more innovative talent and saves marketing costs, but these papers are interesting nonetheless.

The Simple Economics of Open Source:

The nexus of open source development appears to have shifted to Europe over the last ten years. This paper explains why this trend undermines cultural arguments about “hacker ethics” and “post-scarcity” gift economies. It suggests that classical economic theory offers a more succinct explanation for the peculiar international distribution of open source development: hacking rises and falls inversely to its opportunity cost. This finding throws doubt on the Schumpeterian assumption that the efficiency of industrial systems can be measured without reference to the social institutions that bind them.

The Fading Altruism of Open Source Development:

The nexus of open source development appears to have shifted to Europe over the last ten years. This paper explains why this trend undermines cultural arguments about “hacker ethics” and “post-scarcity” gift economies. It suggests that classical economic theory offers a more succinct explanation for the peculiar international distribution of open source development: hacking rises and falls inversely to its opportunity cost. This finding throws doubt on the Schumpeterian assumption that the efficiency of industrial systems can be measured without reference to the social institutions that bind them.

economics, free software, open source, oss, peer reviewed

VA Linux founder Larry Augustin on OSS

In Augustin’s view open source development became a necessity in the 1990s when the cost of marketing a program came to exceed the cost of creating it. “My favorite is Salesforce.com. In 1995 they spent under $10 million in R&D and over $100 million in sales and marketing. That doesn’t work.”

“Open source enables people to reach all those customers. It’s a distribution model. The people who create great software can now reach the rest of the world.”

Businesses get the most protection from the GPL, he insisted. “They get protection from competition.” The license’s insistence on reciprocity means no one can take the code you wrote, tweak it, then compete with you.

F/OSS, GPL, Larry Augustin, OSS, distribution, free software, marketing, open source

Does open source free your budget up for the best talent?

I asked her if the choice to go with open source is helping her to keep costs in check, here’s what [Dabble CEO Mary Hodder] said:

What happens with open source is you actually spend the same amount of money, but you don’t have lock-in and you pay for really good people to run it. And so you still end up paying. But you just pay in a different place. And I think it’s a much more sustainable model for that kind of server/software development.

Found in south by southwest festivals + conferences

talent, sxsw, sustainability, oss, opensource, cost shifting, Mary Hodder, Dabble

A Solaris sysadmin I’m not. But now that I’ve finally got the Sun T2000 server I begged for a while back, I’ve got to ramp it up right quick.

The first task is to get a, um, LAMP environment up and running (SAMP?…oh, Sun wants us to call it AMPS). A bit of Googling turned up this forum thread that suggested Blastwave.org’s ports of PHP, MySQL, and Apache.

edit: I corrected the model number.

amp, amps, apache, lamp, mysql, open source, oss, php, solaris, sun, t2000

With 1,800 CMS vendors in the marketplace, we’re mining what we know or know-of as a way to shorten the list. Kim named the following four:

• Joomla, a derivative of Mambo
   
• Collage appears to have good content reuse features
   
• OmniUpdate has a good list of higher ed clients
   
• Drupal: open source and turning heads

cms, content management system, joomla, collage, omniupdate, drupal, commercial, open source, oss, web, web management

They say “Zimbra is a community for building and maintaining next generation collaboration technology.” What I’d like to know, however, is whether Zmbra is a community driven, social software answer to the problems of groupware — typically driven by management’s needs.

tags: collaboration, collaboration technology, community needs, community, groupware, management needs, open source, oss, social software, software, zimbra, zimbra collaboration suite