November 12th, 2008
Dismissing the open source bear at the door
Matt Asay was quick today to dismiss a prediction from Trip Chowdhry, published in Barron’s, that we’re all about to go bankrupt.
So far as I could tell, Trip was just riffing off economic bears like Nouriel Roubini who predicted our current trouble and see more of it ahead. A lot more.
Like Roubini I tend to see trouble long before it happens. I like to joke I predicted 9 of the last 4 recessions. I spent much of the late 1990s as a dark prophet, warning that the dot-boom would lead to a dot-bust.
I was eventually right, not that it helped. A whole ton of Internet start-ups went toes-up. My own income was zero in both 2002 and 2003. (It does not help your business to be right.)
Yet progress continued. The Internet grew. Google thrived. This decade has not been “all about the Internet” in an investment sense. But the sector has continued to grow.
It’s this history I want to bring to Chowdry’s piece. We are at the start of a recession. It is, as Gandalf said in the movie version of Lord of the Rings, the deep breath before the plunge.
Business is drying up for everyone. I notice it in the traffic statistics at this blog. I feel it when I go out about my business. Everyone’s wondering where their next sale will come from, the next month’s “nut.”
It’s as true among open source companies as among those with proprietary technology. The latter should have a cash advantage, the former a cost advantage.
Which will survive? A little of both. The smart, the brave, those who have planned well, those who execute best.
But it’s certain some will. Some will be proprietary. Some will be open source. And then new companies will emerge.
To quote another movie character, there will be growth in the spring. Perhaps not this coming spring, but in some spring, in the economy’s spring, there will be growth.
And there will be smart companies around to take advantage of that growth. Including open source companies. Some will be survivors of this time, others will be new.
The best advice I can offer, especially if you’re short of money, is to keep working. Find important jobs that need doing. Find code that can help do them.
So long as you have a laptop with WiFi on it, you are still in the game. And it’s the game, not the score, that counts.
Dana Blankenhorn has been a business journalist for 30 years, a tech freelancer since 1983. You can follow Dana on Twitter. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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