Presentation: TweetPostcapitalism

This talk is about how software, particularly open-source software, is not only eating the world but eating capitalism itself - from the inside out.

Last summer I read Paul Mason's Postcapitalism and thereafter Rifkin's The Zero Marginal Cost Society. As I did this, and made notes, I came to see that our own open sourced products, such as Mini-Mesos and our ElasticSearch Framework, were threatening to disrupt our commercial competitors.

After thinking more about this, it's very obvious to see that open source software, and for example 3-D printing, is not only disrupting how we build things but is also undermining the core relationships of capitalism. If the marginal cost of a unit is free and so is its price, then there cannot be any profit. This one relationship undermines the very foundation of capitalism - something that Marx predicted.

This talk will look at capitalism, post capitalism, and as a case study will look at our ElasticSearch framework for Mesos. I will give insights into how companies can still stay relevant even when software is free - and I will do this by looking at how windmills utterly disrupted landowners in 11th century Yorkshire.