OpenBusiness (was: Re: [ox-en] Re: Business opportuities based on Free Software)
- From: Stefan Merten <smerten oekonux.de>
- Date: Wed, 31 May 2006 08:55:20 +0200
Hi Franz!
Last week (13 days ago) Franz Nahrada wrote:
And concerning the leisure time - programming, I think we see a decline of
peoples abilities to devote their leisure time to any productive activity
as a consequence of massive layoffs and intensification of labor. Why
should programmers be free of the normal condition of life in a
capitalistic society?
Yes. However, I don't know for Austria but in Germany layoffs
("Entlassungen"?) generate leisure time in the first place.
I'd consider unemployment even a chance for Free Activities. However,
it's a chance which is not realized. The reasons for this would be
interesting.
I even think the importance of business-driven support for communities is
on the rise. Businesses do it out of their own interests, but that does
not keep them sometimes from doing things right and doing the right things.
on openbusiness.cc
I looked at that site recently and would agree that it is really
interesting. I'd like to quote a bit to highlight some things.
From the mission statement:
OpenBusiness is a platform to share and develop innovative Open
Business ideas- entrepreneurial ideas which are built around
openness, free services and free access. The two main aims of the
project are to build an online resource of innovative business
models, ideas and tools, and to publish an OpenBusiness Guidebook.
From http://www.openbusiness.cc/2006/05/20/what-is-an-openbusiness/:
We started Openbusiness to share knowledge about business models
that give a substantial portion of their main product away for free.
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
This seems very important to me.
So for instance the well-known business models for mobile phones or
similar are not OpenBusiness because they only give away some teaser
just to sell their main product.
By "free" we meant free as in "freedom" and also as in "free beer",
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Again very important.
paraphrasing Richard Stallman's famous illustration of the
difference between "freed" from restrictions of intellectual
property law and a product which literally costs nothing.
This is also beyond Free Software!
So far Openbusiness.cc has, however, also found a wide range of
businesses who literally give something away for free. Free then can
mean not only making a song, book, movie or service available for
zero cost, but also that the product is "freed" by attaching a
Creative Commons license.
In contrast to closed business models, which prefer to lock content
away,
Seems like this relates only to information goods.
on the internet business models that encourage and facilitate
sharing thrive. For example, some record labels enable sharing of
their recording, and only charge for high quality versions of songs.
In other examples, so called web 2.0 services such as Flickr, offer
free platforms for sharing of pictures, and by giving so much for
free create vast networks, communities and platforms with an
intrinsic value, offering numerous opportunities to create revenue.
Putting it into one sentence for an unusual business advice: The
more you give, the more you get! Giving away lots makes sense,
because only then people will use your content, see you, recognize
you. This is why Creative Commons now looks like a rationale option
for many artists, content creators, authors, photographers or even
established media businesses.
I think there is something important to note: Unless we are talking of
donations there *must* be something you don't give away but sell. So
it is clear that such an OpenBusiness needs to be two-fold.
In my opinion this is one of the most important insights of
Openbusiness.cc so far. For more than a decade we have known that
the Internet reduces substantially transaction costs and because of
this services like ebay could emerge. They connect thousands of
sellers with potential buyers for even the most unlikely products
(what has now become famous as the so-called "long tail theory"),
something that was logistically impossible in the
physical-distribution environment.
Now we are beginning to understand how in the digitally networked
world "attention" becomes not only a currency with which you can
attract advertisement revenue, but a much more diverse and crucial
feature of emerging open business models built around participatory
architectures, where co-creation and collaboration are the norm and
not the exception. Given this our working definition of 'open'
includes mechanisms for opening up ways to create, produce,
collaborate and share a wide variety of informational resources.
Yet, thinking practically, MySpace - one of the best known 'open'
platforms for sharing content and information - recently changed its
copyright policy following acquisition by Murdoch. Today everything
which is uploaded to the site, your pictures, movies and recordings
belongs, legally at least, to them. This position is clearly in
opposition to some of the benefits sought by loosening intellectual
property restrictions. The definition of 'open' also depends, in
this regard, on encouraging communities which are sustainable.
There is also another aspect of how "Openess" changes the way
business operates: Big industrial organisational models which were
made for the era of mass-media and mass-production make no sense
anymore. An online record label run by a staff of three can perform
similar functions to a big record label run by hundreds of people.
New organizational forms, new management styles and cultural norms
are emerging, as well as new revenue models. But are these
businesses more ethical, because they can re-distribute more, or
radically reduce the costs of publishing making access to
educational resources much cheaper?
OpenBusiness believes that this is a key debate... Where are the
boundaries of these "open" practises and where do they need to be
maintained and strengthened to be meaningful?
Absolutely.
If you have a comment or discussion that you would like to
contribute we would love to hear from you!
http://www.openbusiness.cc/2006/05/20/what-is-an-openbusiness/
Mit Freien Grüßen
Stefan
--
Please note this message is written on an offline laptop
and send out in the evening of the day it is written. It
does not take any information into account which may have
reached my mailbox since yesterday evening.
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