Where the gift economy rubber meets the road

In the process of reworking and updating the NOSI (Nonprofit Open Source Initiative) primer that was first written in 2004, there are several things that have emerged that have dramatically changed from then. First is the wholesale movement toward the three major open source CMS platforms/frameworks, Drupal, Joomla and Plone. Second is that Linux servers seem to have made very serious inroads into nonprofit organizations, such that they are becoming almost commonplace. Third, almost everyone uses Firefox, or at least knows about it. The fourth, and very interesting development, is the relationships that have been developing between nonprofit-focused technology providers of all stripes and open source developer communities (at this point, primarily CMS projects.)

There will be detailed case studies in the new primer, but what’s been striking to me is how many examples of this there are out there. Technology providers are beginning to really invest in free and open source platforms, and it looks like everyone is benefiting – the organization, the clients, the developer communities, and, by extension, then, other providers and users of those projects. And so the feedback cycle keeps going.

This may be where the gift economy rubber meets the road. Providers seem to be surviving (or thriving) with this model, free and open source software projects are getting the support they need, and clients are getting the software solutions they need. This is a model that is impossible with proprietary software. It’s a model I hope spreads beyond the CMS space, into other areas. There are all sorts of worthy candidates!