In his recently published book titled Reinventing Collapse, author Dmitry Orlov compares and contrasts the collapse of the former Soviet Union with the observable signs of a declining United States. Orlov's wide-ranging analysis touches on the information technology business where he makes several insightful comments.
Orlov states that the United States initially dominated the information technology arena during the free-wheeling era of the 1970s and 1980s that produced a number of significant random and accidental successes. These storied successes included: Apple, 3Com, Compaq, Microsoft, Novell, Lotus, Sun, WordPerfect, Borland, Ashton-Tate and Cisco. But along the way the United States engaged in a strategy to "kill the golden goose" by enforcing intellectual property laws, allowing patents on software and perpetrating a fraud called "enterprise software."
In the Internet age of the 1990s it was no longer possible to enforce intellectual property laws governing information in the form of computer code or movies, since it could easily be copied and distributed. Orlov argues the the only people still paying to rent this information are Americans who are afraid of being prosecuted. And with the dubious extension of patents to software, the United States has now limited the type of speech software developers are free to engage in unless they are employed by large corporations who have amassed a war chest of software patents, which they threaten to use against potential lawsuits by competitors or anyone they feel threatened by.
Orlov criticizes bureaucratized corporate software development, which has placed multiple layers of project managers, systems architects, marketing flacks, sales weasels and corporate management on top of software developers who must cobble together pieces of purchased and licensed code that takes an army of software consultants to get working, if it ever works at all. The end result is a "solution" that is expensive to license and implement and not open to inspection and modification by the people who have to use it. Bugs are fixed on the vendor's time-table and are frequently late in coming or not adequately addressed.
Under such a system Orlov claims it is no wonder that the best developers now create their software outside of this system as open-source projects. And unless software patents are done away with, the commercial software business in the United States is in danger of disappearing as open-source garners a larger and more receptive audience.
It is easy to see how open-source software will improve and thrive in a declining economy. Businesses are under immediate and long-term pressure to reduce IT costs, which they can do by replacing expensive proprietary software with open-source alternatives.
Ditto for federal, state and local governments whose storage of public documents in vendor-controlled proprietary formats will be challenged because these formats make public documents more expensive to access when they require the use of a vendor's proprietary applications.
Public K-12 educational institutions face serious budgetary constraints in a declining economy. Taxpayers will demand that public schools use free and open-source software alternatives to more expensive proprietary software that completely stifles the educational benefit of being able to take software apart, learn how it works, modify it and give copies of it to your friends.
The good news in this scenario is the demand for people capable of supporting and modifying open-source software will be on the rise. So the sooner the K-12 public education establishment gets going with open-source software adoption, the sooner their graduates will have opportunities to enter gainful employment creating and supporting open-source software. A side benefit could be increased student interest in attending higher education programs in computer science.
Open-source software will be increasingly valuable in a declining economy. That said, can there be any doubt that the only software development model that will thrive in a declining economy will be one based on open-source software?
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