Re: Money for peer production? (was: Re: [ox-en] There is no such thing like "peer money")
- From: "Florian v. Samson" <fsamson unix-ag.uni-kl.de>
- Date: Fri, 29 Aug 2008 18:58:32 +0200
Hi all,
On Wed, Aug 27, 2008 at 06:27:44PM [PHONE NUMBER REMOVED], Stefan Merten wrote:
BTW: This is really a great discussion :-) .
I have been following this thread every nw and then, and was surprised
by the large divergence in perception.
Last month (45 days ago) Michel Bauwens wrote:
Let's take Linux, for a long time, it was relatively successfull but on a
marginal scale.
You measure success in being used I guess.
Well, I remember technical success (especially passing SCO-Unix in
functionality in the late 1990s, as this was the only cheap UNIX for
x86 ("PCs")), commercial success, and broad use on servers starting
also in the very late 1990s, going hand in hand.
Since then Linux has conquered most of the UNIX server market, now being
the most (by numbers) sold UNIX-derivative (and much more often used
than sold).
On the desktop Linux is as marginal as Apples MacOS-X today (supposedly
a little less than MacOS today): each of the two holds 5 - 12 % of the
global market share, but OTOH they are the only significant (by numbers)
desktop-oriented Operating Systems besides MS-Windows.
But as StefanMn pointed out, there is much more F/OSS-Software than
Linux, and it is increasingly often used on MS-Windows.
Examples are many desktop apps as Firefox, Thunderbird, OOo, Gpg4win,
but also a large variety of servers (e.g. SAMBA, Apache, MySQL),
programming languages (Perl, PHP, Python), Frameworks (e.g. Ruby),
development tools, etc..
Most of them have been available and used for many years, already.
I think the "importance" can be best observed (in terms of "weight" on
the global market) watching Microsoft eagerly trying to embrace F/OSS
and integrate it into their business model, for about two yers now:
http://www.codeplex.com/
http://port25.technet.com/
http://www.microsoft.com/opensource/
Recent developments which are remarkable, are:
- Many Netbooks (e.g. Asus EeePC) and most UMPCs come with Linux
preinstalled.
- The push for open standards from administrations (mostly on high-level
administrations, as the EU or on national / state level), which enables
F/OSS to compete much better, especially among office application suites.
- The increasing adoption of F/OSS in administrations (mostly in
low-level administrations, as municipial level or in specific
government offices).
Ciao,
Florian
_________________________________
Web-Site: http://www.oekonux.org/
Organization: http://www.oekonux.de/projekt/
Contact: projekt oekonux.de