Linus Sixpack's Journal: The Big Picture

Its far more appropriate that a company make money selling hardware, the stationary of software speech, than it is that they control what we can say.

20 years ago perhaps, there were few enough computer programmers that proprietary software could bribe or bluff them all into preserving a monopoly. Perhaps there were few enough computers or solution models that they could dominate all the working solutions.

Today developed world companies are swimming in hardware, often throwing out working hardware on vendor demand - not necessity. The number of programmers has grown and alternate programming methods have a long line of useful success stories to point to.

Proprietary software has received copyright protection from duplication but is it fair they receive patent protection from competing keyboards and new programmers? Is it in society's interest that a software writer from a small\poor company have to defend every logical observation and discoverred method because something similar was done in California first?

Patent laws have changed very little since the 19th century. 30 years represents several eternities on the internet.

Microsoft, by dominating the market, has lowered the perceived value of competing solutions such that they might as well be given away. The Solution market is due for a huge correction as companies realize that their own home made solutions make them no money if not implemented at all. Open sourcing solutions at least capitalize their existing training and organization. Service and Support creates wealth and can gain client loyalty.

Proprietary software interests act like railroad barons of the American frontier - they are trying to monopolize key bridges to data flow. They are effectively saying that if I have my business on their tracks I can never make tracks of my own at anything approaching the real cost of track. I cannot build similar bridges,only because they built first. I cannot even use industry tools cheaply because they claim ownership of how you swing a pick.

In the midst of all this the reality is that sharing logic is a principle element of humanity. You may hoard tools & possessions but methods & information want to be free.

Protectionist, monopoly software is like the ancient silk monopoly of China. It has to fail because the world needs to use its computers affectively - not pay Billions of Dollars to Rich American firms for drawing pictures, ordering lists, and filing data.

Proprietary software can change and become a center, perhaps _the_ center, where things are done particularly well or they can slowly become a much resented backwater as more efficient systems spring up to bypass their bridges.

It is immoral to not allow poor countries to modernize for the real cost of organization. License and Permission costs are not real costs. Hardware companies know that, and will eventually sell to the world population at real costs plus a small profit margin.

As we absorb computers into how our culture operates society must claim computer languages, and their phrases and nuances, as 'free speech' the exercise of which is a right.

LS