Open Source and the Global Economic Recession
September 16th, 2008
Open source software provides tremendous economic benefits, but can it save the world from global economic recession?
The crisis being experienced in the financial services industry today is entirely due to greed. Companies like Lehman Brothers were built on pyramids of gluttony; from the folks on the ground, who inflated their deal books to maximize their bonuses, right the way up the chain to the executive management team who reaped tremendous rewards by turning a blind eye to nefarious business practices.
Selfless open source contributors who donate their time, energy and talent for the greater good will not be able to comprehend this level of selfishness and greed and will no doubt play a vital role in reinstating economic stability. The reverberations from what’s happening on Wall Street are already being felt on main street and in the coming months we’ll witness unprecedented levels of staff and budget reductions. Free and open source software could provide relief to budget starved CIOs ,but there’s cost and risk associated with moving platforms and who could blame a CIO for being risk averse in times like these.
I’d like to invite those of you who have been successful with free and open source software to share your successes. Let’s build a library of success stories, lessons learned, best practices and tools to assist with the migration process and let’s put the CIO in a position where he can slam the door on commercial software vendors charging exorbitant license fees for commodity software.
Related blogs:
http://weblog.infoworld.com/openresource/archives/2008/09/could_open_sour.html
September 21st, 2008 at 5:13 pm
So is Ingres a non-profit organization working for “the greater good”?
September 21st, 2008 at 8:40 pm
Ingres is not a registered charity, but we do provide the opportunity to download our software for free, and use it without ever paying us a penny. Ingres has a large and active community of users who, in combination with members of our team, provide support through community forums and news groups. As with many other open source companies there’s the opportunity to purchase a support subscription which provides 24×7 enterprise support, but its not mandatory.
October 12th, 2008 at 5:20 am
Hi ! I am a small micro company born in 2003, and start up as a free and self financed reality from a bigger one in the Milan metropoltan area. Since he beginning I have adopted open source solutions to create open software applications and power up larger companies.
Studio M2J creates open source solutions that works and, using Ingres and Apache we are now
running a complete , cost zero, three-tier layer. Only a small team of three people with me have developed a nice small solution that powers e-commerce oriented web-sites. Last to say ,I have also powered up an e-leraning team and supply training in fundamental opens source programing languages and web oriented educational programs to SME.