The Goldfish Chronicles

As with many of us (especially in the US I suspect), my thoughts at the start of this year turn to the will-it/won’t-it topic of a recession. One of the assumptions of ‘bad times’ is that Open Source will be hurt.

There are two types of Open Source nowadays, there’s money-limited Open Source and time-limited Open Source; the former is most evident in projects that are very strongly backed by commercial companies, whilst the latter is most evident in volunteer projects.

I think it’s going to be true that if there is a recession, that it can hurt the projects which rely on a strong amount of corporate backing; for two separate reasons. The first is the obvious one that will occur if companies realign their foci on a different strategy, lay people off or the money dries up for other things (conference trips, open source company VC etc). The second is going to be the more interesting one, those projects which not only rely on a strong amount of backing, but are also owned by that company, will feel that thumb as it seeks to change the direction of the project. I think that will do more damage than the temporary lack of funds.

Previously you would have thought that Open Source would have hurt less in a recession as frugality becomes more important, but I suspect it’s in so many places that that effect will be less than previously. Plus the company reliant projects are loosely tied to a revenue stream and that frugality will hurt the revenue stream even if it doesn’t hurt the project itself.

A trickier one to consider are the time-limited projects. These, generally volunteer, projects have both pro’s and con’s in a recession. Longer work hours, being out of a job, a general depressed industry will all lead to people having less time to indulge, however those same things will also increase their need to escape, and an evening Open Source project is often more about escaping from the day than it is about repeating the work of the day. In the hunt for jobs, small advantages like project involvement will help resumes stand out and contributors may be less unemployed than non-contributors.

New jobs will also mean new experiences, and such times may imply a greater creativity than a previously steady employment market had led to. People will be forced to think new things and this will lead to new projects.

In summary, this is a tale of the Tortoise and the Hare. Corporate Open Source is high energy, speedy and volatile; while Hobbyist Open Source is slow, steady and stable.

[Don’t take this as a claim that Apache will be fine - many Apache projects get a lot from Corporate Open Source]

This entry was posted on Monday, January 21st, 2008 at 9:53 pm and is filed under Opinion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.