It is often said that the government is not able to use money/resources efficiently. As efficient as private entrepreneurs can. Well, I agree.
However recently I’ve seen a couple of proprietary software projects, which were closed by the authors. You cannot download the mobile application. There is no website. It’s over.
And I have thought about community projects, collaborative projects. It looks like sometimes community projects can be even more efficient, because(if) they have no(limited) means to earn money. They decrease expenses as much as possible, and design software accordingly. And they can be more sustainable, though they have no income. Of course it depends on the community size. Number of speakers of the technology. (:
An example? Consider failed social network start-up. Now consider Diaspora. Social network start-up had to pay a lot for servers and infrastructure. Keep a space, and developers. Diaspora is hosted in different places, even on cheap one board computers. That’s about design and efficiency. Of course it has problems, and the development is not that fast as desirable. But the project is very efficient in some aspects.
#design #efficiency #free_software #software #diaspora #social_network #web #freedom #technology #sustainability
