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Valuable Lessons, Celebrations and Philosophy

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Free Markets, Open Economy, Open Source Software and the Internet

I don’t think I fully got my point across in my post on Maximizing Profits and PHP Programming. The example was too specific. It would be silly of me to ignore the fact that Linux, Apache, MySQL, PostgreSQL, GCC and an almost unending list of other programs have helped me sustain my family legally and respectably at no cost to me, other than time. I’ve been fortunate enough to travel to Canada and share my knowledge with others, and I was even more fortunate to be compensated for sharing my knowledge in Canada’s currency by an internationally known company: PHP|Architect. Now… I’m being offered the opportunity to consistently write on using PHP for the International PHP Magazine and PHP Solutions Magazine.

Becoming less consumer minded, and more producer minded (Entrepreneur magazine calls my type ‘Prosumers‘) has made me grow in frustration with the closed source software companies to no end. And these days… that category has expanded to closed technology markets, and Apple is definitely on that list. Let me explain.

I want to produce music professionally, but I don’t want to keep paying $2500 for a new Mac G* every three years because the latest greatest software won’t run on my old G3. I want to create Rich Client Web Applications, but I don’t want to buy Flash 2006, only to have the XML stuff really worked out a year later for an extra $200 via upgrade. So…. I’m praying that Novell can make a Linux distro, SuSE 9.3 or otherwise, that will eliminate my desire to use a Mac. I just dont wanna be their consumer anymore.

The problem with the closed source/technology model is a very scary one. Since the use of their technology is the ‘product’ or ‘goods’ sold by the company, the software they offer can’t be the end all be all, or else the company will have no recurring sales. Therefore, even if you are totally impressed with a new Operating System from Microsoft, you won’t be so impressed a year from now. And two years from now, you’ll probably want to upgrade. You may actually upgrade by the third year. This fact alone makes every consistent consumer of closed source software a constant stream of revenue for the software company. And for the consumer, the software company has now become an expense, and worse a liability in your accounting books.

So the question becomes… how does Open Source Software cure this problem for the consumer? The answer to that question lies in a couple of other fundamental economic principles. One is Free Markets. I don’t want to get into a blown out discussion about free markets and communism, or other ideologies. I just want to talk about the simplest meaning of the term.

Free Markets are markets where all are free to participate as both buyers and sellers.

This is a very important point. It means that where there is a need, anyone may meet that need without restriction due to class, race, sex, religion, creed or otherwise. No, these don’t matter in the free market, capital and market share do. Those with more capital almost always do a more effective job of ‘Marketing’ their goods or services. Marketing is the practice of trying to gain shares in the available market. So, what does this have to do with Open Source Software?

We need Open Source companies. With marketing budgets and PR and such. These companies are invaluable to the little guys that want to use Open Source Software and pitch it for big jobs against Microsoft’s developers. Businesses that depend on Open Source Software need great support for that software at the enterprise level, or they can’t take the risk of using it. This is why companies like Zend, MySQL AB and JBoss are so important. These companies give credibility in the business world for the use of Open Source Software. They give the perception that there is limited risk in free software, because there is now adequate corporate support for the use of free software. These companies help make Open Source Software more viable.

Open Economy: An economy is said to be open if it has trade with other economies. (Implicitly these are usually assumed to be countries.)

One measure of a country’s openness is the fraction of its GDP devoted to imports and exports. (Econterms)

Government organizations in the United States are moving to Open Source Software for the many advantages it offers, cost being the most consistent one. Intelligent people everywhere are realizing that there is an alternative in computing to paying for the use of closed source software. At the heart of this awakening is the greatest vehicle of free speech and the free market that the world may have ever seen; The Internet. Thanks to the Internet, I can write an article here in the US and have it published by a company in Germany and make money oversees. Open economy is key to the ability to maximize profits with Open Source Software. Now, I can take this knowledge of free software and sell it all over the world just because of email (yup… it’s still the killer app).

The botton line is that the internet itself is more exciting than any single technology that works by way of it. The Semantic Web is cool, but it isn’t everything. Just think, I now pay $30.00 less a month for a much better quality telephone service with unlimited long distance in my country because it runs over the Internet. So the promise that the Internet has delivered on for the last ten years is nothing short of revolutionary. Our lives are not the same as they were in 1991, and it’s not just because of blogs.

Although I do love blogs :)

You can Maximize Your Profits with Open Source Software because of free markets, open economy and the Internet. And it’s really an absolutely limitless resource, because it costs you nothing but time. Be brave, take the plunge.

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29 April 2005 comments [4] TrackBack-URI

Int’l PHP Mag: ‘PHP 5 Tried For You’ Tackles Event_Dispatcher

I’ve been asked to become the regular author of a column in International PHP Magazine dedicated to utilizing PHP 5’s new features and PEAR packages called ‘PHP 5 Tried For You‘. My first article is in the latest issue: 03.2005 and covers Event Handling with Event_Dispatcher. This package deals with the creation of Events, Dispatchers and Listeners with the purpose of creating a notification system whereby different objects can be registered and notified of particular events so that they can execute predefined functionality for those events. This kind of functionality is found overwhelmingly in Java and even Application frameworks such as Apple’s Cocoa. I hope you PHPers enjoy the article and continue to push the ‘maturity’ envelope on software development with PHP.

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19 April 2005 comment [1] TrackBack-URI

Maximizing Profits and PHP Programming

All the PHP haters are going to have to eat their opinions when people realize that you can program PHP and make money doing it for the following reasons:

  1. PHP has a low barrier to entry.
  2. PHP costs nothing to deploy commercially.
  3. PHP has all of the documentation needed to learn it efficiently and correctly.
  4. PHP has a universally recognized certification for professionals.
  5. PHP has a track record of success in all scales of successful enterprises (even if those enterprises don’t like to admit it).

So… I guess that’s all that matters. The commercial potential of PHP will always outshine the elitist programmer disdain of the language for it’s history of ‘novice script kiddies‘ and lack of ‘true object oriented features‘. Having said that, PHP 5 is a new world and PHP 4’s rebel coders must step up to the challenge and integrate the great new paradigm introduced by the PHP5 object model. But even if they don’t, PHP 4 was certainly at least as effective as ASP 3-4, JSP, Cold Fusion and Perl in it’s era. And in this bold new era of web applications, there is certainly no server-side language that offers more promise than PHP 5.

Update: Robert Peake seems to have the same interests as me when it comes to making the business case for PHP. There are different ways that this case could be presented, but one may want to look towards PHPQuebec, which lobbied to the Canadian government on the merits of using Open Source Software, PHP in particular. There is a need for this kind of info… maybe there is a need for a Non-Profit business league that strictly focuses on promoting the benefits of PHP in the business world, and getting that ratio of PHP to Java job offers on Dice evened out a bit?

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14 April 2005 comments [17] TrackBack-URI

Text_CAPTCHA article now on OnLamp

The article I wrote that originally appeared in the articles section of phpsec.org, has now been ’syndicated’ on onLamp.com. This is a bit of a scheduling mixup where the article took a bit longer to get published with OnLamp then I thought, so it made it to phpsec.org first. In the future I will be writing a regular set of articles for OnLamp though, so I guess this is still news worthy, and it gets the article (and the PHP Security Consortium) in front of more folks. So, it’s all good.

January 2008 August 2007 July 2007 June 2007 May 2007 April 2007 March 2007 January 2007 November 2006 October 2006 September 2006 August 2006 July 2006 June 2006 May 2006 March 2006