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OpenBusiness (was: Re: [ox-en] Re: Business opportuities based on Free Software)



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.

_________________________________
Web-Site: http://www.oekonux.org/
Organization: http://www.oekonux.de/projekt/
Contact: projekt oekonux.de



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