Economics

Today at 4PM 14 people met together in a comfortable room at the Society for Promotion of Alternative Computing and employment (SPACE). These were people who came together because they wanted to see how they could contribute towards fighting unfairness and injustice in the world. These were people who came together because they felt that they could do something about it.

If you have worked with Free Software at some point of time in your career then you would definitely have come across this question from some quarters. How does Free Software work. Although it is theoretically possible to make money with Free Software not too many people are doing this. That is because quite a lot of people work for Free Software because of what Free Software is and because of the community behind Free Software. I am presenting here a graphical representation of the Free Software Ecosystem.

If you have not read Google's corporate mission then here it goes - 'Google's mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful.'. The way they had set out to doing this was to initially offer a very powerful search engine that made the world's information available at everyones fingertips. Now they were making money by guessing people's preferences based on the content they search for and by showing them relevant advertisements and acting as a shrewd marketing agent. Well they didn't stop there.

I am a strict believer in the philosophy of the four 'R's - Reduce, Reuse, Repair, Recycle. The story I had written a few days back about the death of a dear friend is proof for this claim. For that matter, that is not even the friend with whom I have shared the longest of my friendships :-). Humor aside the point is that it is possible to practice this philosophy. It might be a little difficult initially but it is just a matter of making up your mind.

Most people who have some idea about economics would have heard of the malthusian law of diminishing returns which states that the marginal increase in production decreases as more of the contributing factor is used in production. But I am very confident that nobody has heard of "the law of diminishing efforts". That is because it never existed until now.

I was asked by the magazine editor of College of Engineering Trivandrum to prepare an interesting article on Free Software covering the various aspects around it. The article is supposed to go into the CET College Magazine. I have prepared a reasonably elaborate article and have posted it in my longer and philosophical blog. It would be great if you can please chip in and review the article here - Making Money with Free Software