Some people said it was just a normal teenage phase. But I knew in my heart there was something wrong with Stephen. His work was going downhill: he was turning up late, not concentrating. He just wasn't himself. He was staying in his room constantly, not coming near us, not even saying good morning. He was going out and getting into fights and he's a passive person. He was going missing for days. We didn't know where he was and he'd come home with bruises and he wouldn't remember what had happened.
He was acting quite strangely and saying he had super powers and things like that. He thought I was dead. He thought someone had killed me and chopped my head off. But he'd been drinking a lot and when people drink they act pretty strangely.
We ended up taking him to our GP and Stephen opened up a little bit. The GP said: "Well, why not be admitted to hospital for a while?" I was hoping Stephen would agree but he wouldn't go. He just thought that he was OK, because he was OK maybe 15 per cent of the time, but mostly he wasn't. The doctor put him on antidepressants. But he was just getting worse and worse.
We ended up getting him referred to a psychiatrist. But he didn't get better. I spent a month running around trying to get people to diagnose him. He was screaming and acting irrationally. Then one day we got a phone call. He was in a police station. I told them I thought something was wrong and I wanted him to go to hospital. I couldn't handle him. He would get very, very upset. He was like a toddler having a tantrum. So the police took him to hospital.
A psychiatrist assessed him and said he was depressed. But if the person acts quite normally, they just don't know what's really the problem. By that time, you see, Stephen was very calm. He really was scared of going into hospital. I think he thought "I'm going nuts, they'll lock me away," all those sorts of fears. Also I'm sure he didn't want people to know. That's a very big thing with young men. The stigma
Sunday, 28 December 2008
Friday, 26 December 2008
Free Can Mean Big Money: The Open Source Economy (section 9)
The established interests (software firms and their paid consultants) have been playing this sob story of how open source is putting them out of business and how it's a threat to the economy, insecure, more expensive, etc, etc. They've even been lobbying the government. It's the same old sob story we've heard over and over, and apparently there are plenty of people who will believe it.
I just hope that they're not successful in implementing any kind of artificial protections for themselves through lobbying, and I say this as a proponent of free trade. Protectionist tariffs and subsidies on domestic agriculture, raw materials, and manufactured goods are a constant temptation for a country that encounters competition from outside. Europe and the United States to this day continue to artificially prop-up domestic industry even as their governments preach the benefits of free trade and open markets. Who are the ones that want to open the markets? Ironically, it's sometimes the same folks who would call open source software proponents communists. The outcry over open source's negative effect on the economy is similar to the U.S. steel situation. The U.S. steel industry is having a hard time competing with imports from abroad, so they successfully lobby the government into slapping tariffs on foreign steel. That keeps steel prices artificially high, and subsequently the U.S. automobile and construction industries suffer. A few steel workers keep their jobs, a few auto workers lose theirs. I'm not familiar enough with the situation to know whether it was a net gain or loss for the country's economy, but the point is that you take away from one side, you give to another. That's the way things work.
Here's another example: Wal-mart has been bad news for small businesses all over the USA, and for their owners and employees. It's been bad for the downtown business districts, some of which have been decimated, while others have been merely forced to transform into restaurant and entertainment promenades. But in the larger picture, has it been bad for America? Well, ask the millions of rural Americans who now have access to socks for $2 per dozen and $35 DVD players. They'll say it's not so bad to have some economy of scale leveraging their purchasing power. (Disclaimer: personally, I hate Wal-Mart, and I love vibrant downtown business districts and small, quirky businesses.) But the point is this: just as we might decry the negative impact that foreign trade or big box stores might have one segment of the economy or society, the net result has been that these factors mean that a couple hundred million Americans can now buy a heck of a lot more for their money that they could twenty years ago.
In conclusion, the number of people who will be negatively affected by the availability of high quality, low cost software is relatively small. The software industry may need to transform, and some firms may not survive, but the overall impact on the economy will be positive. Just because the oil companies are enjoying increased profits due to higher gas prices does not mean that high oil prices is good for the economy. Quite the opposite.
We might have heard a similar story a couple hundred years ago, during the industrial revolution: "But millions of people are employed planting and harvesting, and the tractor will put them all out of business! And the cotton gin will put all those people picking the seeds out of cotton plants out of work! And mechanical looms will put all those weavers out of work! Oh the humanity!"
Every time there's a transformation in one segment of the economy, we hear the same outcry. And while it may be downright tragic for the affected parties, the rest of us can't get too caught up in the drama.
History is chock full of well-meaning people succeeding with their plans and inadvertently making life worse for many others. The early Communists thought they were fighting for freedom. Freedom is a good idea, but if you go about promoting it in the wrong way, you can end up making people less free. You may not notice what's happening until it's too late because ideology can blind you. Many people today who are fighting for intellectual property rules because they think it promotes innovation and progress may actually be actually hammering nails into innovation's coffin.
I just hope that they're not successful in implementing any kind of artificial protections for themselves through lobbying, and I say this as a proponent of free trade. Protectionist tariffs and subsidies on domestic agriculture, raw materials, and manufactured goods are a constant temptation for a country that encounters competition from outside. Europe and the United States to this day continue to artificially prop-up domestic industry even as their governments preach the benefits of free trade and open markets. Who are the ones that want to open the markets? Ironically, it's sometimes the same folks who would call open source software proponents communists. The outcry over open source's negative effect on the economy is similar to the U.S. steel situation. The U.S. steel industry is having a hard time competing with imports from abroad, so they successfully lobby the government into slapping tariffs on foreign steel. That keeps steel prices artificially high, and subsequently the U.S. automobile and construction industries suffer. A few steel workers keep their jobs, a few auto workers lose theirs. I'm not familiar enough with the situation to know whether it was a net gain or loss for the country's economy, but the point is that you take away from one side, you give to another. That's the way things work.
Here's another example: Wal-mart has been bad news for small businesses all over the USA, and for their owners and employees. It's been bad for the downtown business districts, some of which have been decimated, while others have been merely forced to transform into restaurant and entertainment promenades. But in the larger picture, has it been bad for America? Well, ask the millions of rural Americans who now have access to socks for $2 per dozen and $35 DVD players. They'll say it's not so bad to have some economy of scale leveraging their purchasing power. (Disclaimer: personally, I hate Wal-Mart, and I love vibrant downtown business districts and small, quirky businesses.) But the point is this: just as we might decry the negative impact that foreign trade or big box stores might have one segment of the economy or society, the net result has been that these factors mean that a couple hundred million Americans can now buy a heck of a lot more for their money that they could twenty years ago.
In conclusion, the number of people who will be negatively affected by the availability of high quality, low cost software is relatively small. The software industry may need to transform, and some firms may not survive, but the overall impact on the economy will be positive. Just because the oil companies are enjoying increased profits due to higher gas prices does not mean that high oil prices is good for the economy. Quite the opposite.
We might have heard a similar story a couple hundred years ago, during the industrial revolution: "But millions of people are employed planting and harvesting, and the tractor will put them all out of business! And the cotton gin will put all those people picking the seeds out of cotton plants out of work! And mechanical looms will put all those weavers out of work! Oh the humanity!"
Every time there's a transformation in one segment of the economy, we hear the same outcry. And while it may be downright tragic for the affected parties, the rest of us can't get too caught up in the drama.
History is chock full of well-meaning people succeeding with their plans and inadvertently making life worse for many others. The early Communists thought they were fighting for freedom. Freedom is a good idea, but if you go about promoting it in the wrong way, you can end up making people less free. You may not notice what's happening until it's too late because ideology can blind you. Many people today who are fighting for intellectual property rules because they think it promotes innovation and progress may actually be actually hammering nails into innovation's coffin.
Free Can Mean Big Money: The Open Source Economy (section 8)
I guess free software foundations are going to employ people from now on. Its the same evil mega corporations that employ hundreds of thousands of people and make the world economy function. Make them "smaller, weaker, and easier to keep in their place" and raise the unemployment rate to double digits not to mention lowering the standard of living world wide I suggest voting NO for RMS Democracy.
Is it "free software foundations" that pay the paychecks of most of the people developing open source software? No, for the most part it's for-profit enterprises (and some schools) who have a self-interest in producing the software. And who is it who's using all this software? Long-haired hippies running servers for anti-capitalistic websites? Nope, it's everyday IT folks doing everyday work for regular companies.
Open source software has been a tremendous boon for the thousands of small and medium sized businesses that have been mostly shut out of the enterprise software markets, both as producers and consumers. A few small companies like Red Hat and SuSE have been very successful in producing and supporting open source software, and countless small consulting firms have found open source to be a revelation.
Let's have an example: A small consulting firm is hired to solve a problem. The client has a budget of $5000. They could solve that problem in 50 hours by coding it from scratch (earning $100 per hour), or in 20 hours using pre-existing open source software (earning $250/hr). In many cases like this, even if there is commercial software, it would cost more than $5000 just for the license. So this small firm rolls out the open source software, with modifications, makes its $5000, then turns around and sells a similar system to its next client, making another $5000. And the clients get the additional peace of mind knowing that even if this small consulting firm goes away, since their system is built on a known platform, someone else should be able to pick up the pieces. In this case, everybody wins. In fact, the commercial software firm doesn't even lose, because they wouldn't have been interested in this business anyway.
Is it "free software foundations" that pay the paychecks of most of the people developing open source software? No, for the most part it's for-profit enterprises (and some schools) who have a self-interest in producing the software. And who is it who's using all this software? Long-haired hippies running servers for anti-capitalistic websites? Nope, it's everyday IT folks doing everyday work for regular companies.
Open source software has been a tremendous boon for the thousands of small and medium sized businesses that have been mostly shut out of the enterprise software markets, both as producers and consumers. A few small companies like Red Hat and SuSE have been very successful in producing and supporting open source software, and countless small consulting firms have found open source to be a revelation.
Let's have an example: A small consulting firm is hired to solve a problem. The client has a budget of $5000. They could solve that problem in 50 hours by coding it from scratch (earning $100 per hour), or in 20 hours using pre-existing open source software (earning $250/hr). In many cases like this, even if there is commercial software, it would cost more than $5000 just for the license. So this small firm rolls out the open source software, with modifications, makes its $5000, then turns around and sells a similar system to its next client, making another $5000. And the clients get the additional peace of mind knowing that even if this small consulting firm goes away, since their system is built on a known platform, someone else should be able to pick up the pieces. In this case, everybody wins. In fact, the commercial software firm doesn't even lose, because they wouldn't have been interested in this business anyway.
Free Can Mean Big Money: The Open Source Economy (section 7)
The side of the story that's ignored is that there are two sides to the software industry: the producers and the consumers. In fact, the number of companies and individuals who use software vastly outnumber those that produce it. And there are two sides to corporate profit: revenues and expenses. The average corporation spends a huge amount of money, a significant percentage of its IT budget, on software licensing.
Take a look at the largest companies in the world. Of them, only Microsoft makes the majority of its money from software licensing. A handful of them, IBM, HP, Siemens, Hitachi, Motorola, Lockheed, Intel, make some of their money from software sales, generally a small part. A few, like Wal-Mart and Best Buy make a small portion of their revenue from retail sales of software. So the vast majority of large global companies consume software rather than produce it. Same goes for small businesses. And let's not forget governments and academic and research institutions, some of the other largest consumers of software. When looked at it from this angle, if the cost of software is driven down by competition from open source, and thus a major cost of doing business is reduced for global industry, will it be a net gain or net loss to the economy?
And the cost savings can come in unexpected places. A large corporation that I know of replaced thousands of Sun/Solaris servers with inexpensive Intel/Linux ones and ended up saving $250,000 per year -- in electricity -- on top of millions of dollars in licensing fees. Where did that money go? Did it disappear into the ether? Well, Sun Microsystems (and the power company) probably thinks it did, but in fact, instead of going to Sun, it went to pay salaries, to fund new projects, and back to the shareholders in dividends and a kick in the stock price due to greater profits. In other words, it went right into the economy. Every dollar not spent on software licenses is spent on something else.
And economics is not a zero-sum game. Money can be spent in ways in which its positive impact on the economy is greater or lesser. If a firm spends $25 million developing a software product that never achieves widespread use and never makes much of an impact (and a huge proportion of commercial software projects fall into this category), the only positive impact on the economy will be the transfer of funds from company coffers to general circulation (and taxes) via the salaries of the employees involved.
On the other hand, if a useful piece of software becomes available at little or no cost to many companies, especially to companies that otherwise would not have been able to afford such software, it can give a major boost to that company's productivity. In that case, even if no money was spent, all those companies increased their efficiency and revenues. Increased productivity and decreased expenses can have a massive effect on a company's bottom line.
Take a look at the largest companies in the world. Of them, only Microsoft makes the majority of its money from software licensing. A handful of them, IBM, HP, Siemens, Hitachi, Motorola, Lockheed, Intel, make some of their money from software sales, generally a small part. A few, like Wal-Mart and Best Buy make a small portion of their revenue from retail sales of software. So the vast majority of large global companies consume software rather than produce it. Same goes for small businesses. And let's not forget governments and academic and research institutions, some of the other largest consumers of software. When looked at it from this angle, if the cost of software is driven down by competition from open source, and thus a major cost of doing business is reduced for global industry, will it be a net gain or net loss to the economy?
And the cost savings can come in unexpected places. A large corporation that I know of replaced thousands of Sun/Solaris servers with inexpensive Intel/Linux ones and ended up saving $250,000 per year -- in electricity -- on top of millions of dollars in licensing fees. Where did that money go? Did it disappear into the ether? Well, Sun Microsystems (and the power company) probably thinks it did, but in fact, instead of going to Sun, it went to pay salaries, to fund new projects, and back to the shareholders in dividends and a kick in the stock price due to greater profits. In other words, it went right into the economy. Every dollar not spent on software licenses is spent on something else.
And economics is not a zero-sum game. Money can be spent in ways in which its positive impact on the economy is greater or lesser. If a firm spends $25 million developing a software product that never achieves widespread use and never makes much of an impact (and a huge proportion of commercial software projects fall into this category), the only positive impact on the economy will be the transfer of funds from company coffers to general circulation (and taxes) via the salaries of the employees involved.
On the other hand, if a useful piece of software becomes available at little or no cost to many companies, especially to companies that otherwise would not have been able to afford such software, it can give a major boost to that company's productivity. In that case, even if no money was spent, all those companies increased their efficiency and revenues. Increased productivity and decreased expenses can have a massive effect on a company's bottom line.
Free Can Mean Big Money: The Open Source Economy (section 6)
The software industry is one of the United States' most important industries. According to the BSA, the software industry makes a greater contribution to the US GDP than any other manufacturing industry. (Manufacturing makes up almost 14% of the US GDP, according to the US Bureau of Economic Analysis). More than 800,000 people are employed by the software industry, and they make an average of $69K per year (BSA). And this is more or less the case with most developed countries. Software makes up an important part of the world economy. How would the widespread adoption of open source software affect this segment of the economy?
It's impossible to speculate with complete accuracy, but I think we could all agree on some basic generalizations:
It would open up the possibility of a shift of dominance away from the United States. Though much open source software originated in the US, there are no artificial controls to prevent people in other countries using and improving upon that software, and in fact obtaining de-facto dominance of any particular niche.
Some companies' product lines are sure to suffer, and under-diversified companies might go out of business altogether. Intel and Linux delivered a 1-2 punch to companies like SGI and Sun; Oracle may face reduced profits in the future as open source databases like Postgres and MySQL attack their low-end market and creep up; Microsoft has already seen Linux and Apache prevent it from easy domination in the low-to-mid-end web server market.
It's possible that we could see a fundamental shift in the software industry away from predominantly earning money from licensing fees into making money from support contracts, automated update and maintenance services, and consulting services. Some major software companies, like IBM, Oracle, and SAP already make a large proportion, if not the majority of their software-related money from services and support contracts, and that has been the case long before open source came on the scene.
If it ever got to the point that software users came to expect that most software would be free of charge, it would become difficult for an individual or small company to make any money by creating and licensing software. This is already shown itself to be true in the Linux subculture. So much of the software for Linux is free that there isn't much of a market in shareware for Linux, as there is for the Windows and Mac platforms. FTP clients, utilities and other small, purpose specific software that would cost $10-20 (shareware) on Windows is generally available free of charge for Linux, and generally included outright on your typical Linux distribution. Individuals or small firms that might have an interest in distributing a shareware app on Linux probably just don't bother.
So it's likely that if open source software became more widespread there would be some negative impact on the economy. Some companies that are currently in business might be forced to change focus, survive with slimmer profit margins, or even go under as a result. Some companies that might have existed otherwise will never come to be at all. And individual countries, like the United States, might see their dominance in the software industry wane as the market is opened up to other, probably poorer, countries, like India and China.
So in the U.S., software company profits are likely to decline, and some jobs will probably be lost. There will be a negative economic effect from open source software.
Plenty of people have made similar claims, with the most vulnerable of the software firms, industry associations, and their paid mouthpieces being the most vocal. And they do have a point. The problem is, as is the case with any fact that's promoted by an aggrieved party, that there's another side to the story that's conveniently ignored.
It's impossible to speculate with complete accuracy, but I think we could all agree on some basic generalizations:
It would open up the possibility of a shift of dominance away from the United States. Though much open source software originated in the US, there are no artificial controls to prevent people in other countries using and improving upon that software, and in fact obtaining de-facto dominance of any particular niche.
Some companies' product lines are sure to suffer, and under-diversified companies might go out of business altogether. Intel and Linux delivered a 1-2 punch to companies like SGI and Sun; Oracle may face reduced profits in the future as open source databases like Postgres and MySQL attack their low-end market and creep up; Microsoft has already seen Linux and Apache prevent it from easy domination in the low-to-mid-end web server market.
It's possible that we could see a fundamental shift in the software industry away from predominantly earning money from licensing fees into making money from support contracts, automated update and maintenance services, and consulting services. Some major software companies, like IBM, Oracle, and SAP already make a large proportion, if not the majority of their software-related money from services and support contracts, and that has been the case long before open source came on the scene.
If it ever got to the point that software users came to expect that most software would be free of charge, it would become difficult for an individual or small company to make any money by creating and licensing software. This is already shown itself to be true in the Linux subculture. So much of the software for Linux is free that there isn't much of a market in shareware for Linux, as there is for the Windows and Mac platforms. FTP clients, utilities and other small, purpose specific software that would cost $10-20 (shareware) on Windows is generally available free of charge for Linux, and generally included outright on your typical Linux distribution. Individuals or small firms that might have an interest in distributing a shareware app on Linux probably just don't bother.
So it's likely that if open source software became more widespread there would be some negative impact on the economy. Some companies that are currently in business might be forced to change focus, survive with slimmer profit margins, or even go under as a result. Some companies that might have existed otherwise will never come to be at all. And individual countries, like the United States, might see their dominance in the software industry wane as the market is opened up to other, probably poorer, countries, like India and China.
So in the U.S., software company profits are likely to decline, and some jobs will probably be lost. There will be a negative economic effect from open source software.
Plenty of people have made similar claims, with the most vulnerable of the software firms, industry associations, and their paid mouthpieces being the most vocal. And they do have a point. The problem is, as is the case with any fact that's promoted by an aggrieved party, that there's another side to the story that's conveniently ignored.
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