IT Manager's Journal has a review of Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything, "one of the first efforts to explain open source and Web 2.0 to the traditional business community."

The author is very much an open sourcer, but within the confines of that viewpoint the review is useful. It also triggered my well-calloused Amazon one-click finger.

The confines? Well, like most open source evangelism, it ignores the fundamental problem that human activities need an economic base. The existence of income is pretty much assumed. This is always the problem with the open source stuff -- who doubts that collaboration is a good thing? That is, after all, what societies and economies are about. But this does not mean one can ignore the issue of revenues and rewards.

The underlying premise of most open source reasoning seems to be "assume a trust fund!" (Or a government subidy.) Or else -- "we'll sell ads."

In the real world of business, of course, the economics of open source are "let's commoditize the software or the content so that we can monetize the hardware/services," or "let's gets people to give us content for free so that we monetize the eyeballs."

If the book contains a frank discussion of these issues, I'll let you know.

posted by James DeLong @ 9:46 AM | Free Culture Movement

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