Plutocrats and the New Soviet Union

One of the joys of reading blogs is that you get to follow writers who are focussed on one particular area, and who, as a result of that almost monastic concentration, are able to produce insights of sudden insight unavailable to otherwise skilled wordsmiths who write more generalist pieces.

Here's one such gem that caught me by surprise as I finally came across it in my overburdened RSS reader:

an extreme concentration of wealth at the center of our market economy has led to a form of central planning. The concentration of wealth is now in so few hands and is so extreme in degree, that the combined liquid financial power of all of those not in this small group is inconsequential to determining the direction of the economy. As a result, we now have the equivalent of centralized planning in global marketplaces. A few thousand extremely wealthy people making decisions on the allocation of our collective wealth. The result was inevitable: gross misallocation across all facets of the private economy.

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The result of central planning in the US has finally hit the wall. The list of problems is endless. The misallocations range from the dangerous $600 trillion derivatives market to the destruction of the US middle class (by exporting jobs and the substitution of income with debt).

Oh, yes; of course.

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Crowdsourcing Tony Blair

This is brilliant:

The former prime minister Tony Blair has received millions of pounds through an unusual mixture of commercial, charitable and religious income streams. Since he stepped down from office in 2007, his financial affairs have been described by observers as "Byzantine" and "opaque". The Guardian is now launching an online competition offering a prize to the person who can shine the brightest light on those financial structures.

Blair has a commercial consultancy, called Tony Blair Associates, plus jobs advising a US bank and a Swiss insurer. He has a multimillion pound book deal. He also has a charity, the Tony Blair Africa Governance Initiative, and another called the Tony Blair Faith Foundation. But much of the income, which includes charitable donations from other sources, has been funnelled through a structure called Windrush Ventures No 3 Limited Partnership. Our contest asks: what is Windrush?

What could be more condign than for a man who frequently manifested his complete contempt for the view of the ordinary voters (Iraq war, anyone?) should have his money-obsessed and vulgar post-PM life investigated by those self-same little people?

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KMyMoney Will Make the World Go Round

One of the perennial reasons people give for not using free software is that it is lacking some key piece of software. High on that list is personal finances management, a sector dominated by Intuit in the closed source world. So the following is great news:

The KMyMoney development team is pleased to announce a major step forward for what has been described as "the BEST personal finance manager for FREE users". KMyMoney 1.0 has been released. With over 3 years of development, this new stable release has many new features and a refreshed user interface.

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Since our latest stable release, 0.8.9, a lot of effort has been put in by the developers and the community to add new features and test them to ensure a rock-solid release. Over 2 years of development have resulted in the addition of budgets, a forecast feature, many new reports, report charts, a complete redesign of the import feature, which allows for a much easier migration from other application and a swifter synchronization with online banking. The support of PGP encryption for the KMyMoney files has been improved too, including the option to have multiple keys for a single file, so no one can access your financial records. The summary view has been revamped to show more and more useful information, allowing you to have an overview of your financial situation at a glance. Also, there are now translations for 22 languages, though not all of them are as complete as we would like. We have users wherever KDE3 is installed. That results not only in a greater quality application, but also in one that can be customized to fit the needs of a wide range of users. In between all that work, we have fixed a lot of bugs and little annoyances to make this the best KMyMoney release ever.

Let's hope that the word gets out about KMyMoney, and that more people realise that free software really can cover all their needs.

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Show Your Ardour for Ardour

Ardour is a fine open source music program; but like many fine open source programs, it has a problem: money - lack of it. In order to continue to improve the code, the Arbour team ideally needs dosh to pay for programmers and other such handy things; but it's not really happening:

As of now, June 25th, the financial side of things is not looking so good. Last month (May) didn't quite make the $4500 goal, and this month looks certain to fall short by quite a significant margin. There are currently 5-1/2 days left this month, and 28% of the target is still not met. There are no companies backing this project at this time, so its totally incumbent on those of you who use the program and have not yet helped pay to support it to step up and do the right thing. Thanks to everyone who has paid for their contributions and support.

Ardour will continue in some sense even if I find other work, and I believe that Carl, Dave, Hans and others will likely keep up some of their efforts anyway. Since the new download system started, there have been about 9000 OS X downloads and 6000 source code downloads. Less than 3% of the OS X downloads and only three source code downloads were associated with up-front payment, though it seems likely than many users donated after the fact. With a user-base like that, it seems to me that it should be possible to pay one full-time north american developer and to offer occasional payments to others for their outstanding work. What do you think?

Ardour is hardly the only project with these problems, which means that the open source world faces a larger issue: how to raise funds to pay for work that isn't being carried out mostly in bedrooms. It's not something many are thinking about (Matt Asay is an honourable exception), so it's not likely to get solved any time soon - which leaves Ardour in a bit of a pickle. Suggestions and contributions welcome.... (Via Leslie P. Polzer.)

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Do Top Hackers Have Too Much Money?

The announcement that one of MySQL's founders, Monty Widenius, was leaving Sun, was generally regarded as a pity, though no huge surprise, given the rumours that had been swirling since last year. But its impact was redoubled following the even more astonishing news that MySQL's boss, Marten Mickos, was also moving on; together, they inevitably sent shock-waves through the open source world. Most analysis has centred on the state of Sun, and whether these two high-profile departures mean that the MySQL acquisition was a mistake, or has already failed. But here, I'd like to look at a bigger question that these moves pose: do top hackers (and their managers) have too much money?

On Linux Journal.

Making Music, Making Money

I've written about this idea before, but it's good to see further evidence that you can make plenty of money from music without worrying about fans copying your songs:

Sweaty rock gigs and hippy festivals have given way to a golden age of live music in the UK.

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"Live music is the ultimate experience. It's not bootleggable, you can't replicate it, you can't steal it, and you can't mimic that experience of actually standing at a gig - the roar of the crowd, the smell of the greasepaint."

RIAA, are you listening?

Manage Real Money in Second Life

Why does this worry me?

Denmark’s Saxo Bank plans to offer Second Life residents the ability to manage their real-life financial portfolios from within the virtual world, and may eventually create a market to trade the Linden dollar against real-world currencies.

Economics as Enemy of the Commons

A nicely provocative post from OnTheCommons.org, which points out the destructive effect of money on the commons:

What is called "economics" today is the world as seen through the myopic and tendentious lens of money and price. If something is transacted through money it has reality; if not it does not exist. It makes no difference that trees provide shade and neighbors provide comfort; it makes no difference that they serve real needs. They are not sold for money and therefore they do not count. Therefore, the more "the economy" destroys these things – the more it displaces that which is free for commodities that we have to buy for money – the more the economy is growing and the better life is getting, or so we are told.