For the curious
Prompt: I am curious about the corporate mergers that resulted in Open Text owning such a large portion of EDI sector

AI Reply:
OpenText’s dominant position in the Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) sector was built through an aggressive, decades-long strategy of consolidation, rolling up the largest legacy EDI networks and modern cloud integration platforms under one umbrella.
Instead of building a network organically, OpenText utilized major corporate mergers to absorb billions of transactions and millions of enterprise relationships.

Timeline of Major EDI Roll-Ups
OpenText systematically absorbed competing Value-Added Networks (VANs) and cloud players, following a strategic timeline:
[Inovis & Harbinger] --(Merged 2009)--> [GXS]
(Acquired 2014)
  [OpenText Portfolio] ---------- [OpenText Cloud] ---------- [Liaison Technologies]
(Acquired 2018)
(Acquired 2017)
Covisint]

Key Acquisitions That Built the Behemoth
1. GXS Group (2014) — The Foundation
The Deal: Acquired for $1.165 billion.
Why it mattered: This single transaction transformed OpenText from a content management provider into a global B2B powerhouse. GXS itself was an amalgamation of legacy giants—originally spun out of General Electric Information Services (GEIS)—and had already merged with Inovis (which owned Harbinger, TrustedLink, and Peregrine Software).
Scale Added: Over 600,000 trading partners and 12 to 16 billion annual transactions.

2. Liaison Technologies (2018) — The Cloud Shift
The Deal: Acquired for $310 million.
Why it mattered: Liaison brought a powerful, modern differentiator called the ALLOY Platform. While GXS provided massive legacy footprint, Liaison added cloud-native capabilities and sophisticated API-to-EDI translation. This enabled OpenText to cater to mid-market enterprises looking to bridge older EDI architectures with web APIs.

3. Covisint (2017) — The Automotive Monopoly
The Deal: Purchased from Compuware for $103 million.
Why it mattered: Covisint was originally founded as a joint venture by automotive titans (General Motors, Ford, and DaimlerChrysler) to handle secure supply chain messaging. Acquiring it locked down highly complex, secure supply chain verticals for OpenText.
The Business Rationale
EDI systems exhibit massive network effects. A supplier prefers a network where their buyers already exist, and vice versa. By executing an M&A roll-up strategy, OpenText cleared out competing infrastructure, captured the critical mass of global traffic, and positioned its OpenText Business Network as the default central utility for enterprise global trade.

Still Curious?
Prompt: did opentext grid network involve maintaining legacy systems or replatforming?
AI Answer:
The short answer is both, but in a highly strategic, phased timeline.

OpenText initially maintained the legacy systems to avoid disrupting global trade, but eventually executed a massive replatforming initiative to consolidate everything into a single, cloud-native architecture.
Because EDI runs the daily supply chains of Fortune 500 companies, a sudden, forced "rip-and-replace" replatforming would have caused catastrophic business outages. OpenText approached this consolidation through a specific two-stage evolutionary strategy:

Stage 1: The "Keep the Lights On" Legacy Phase
Immediately following major acquisitions (like GXS in 2014), OpenText maintained legacy architectures
Minimizing Disruption: They allowed acquired Value-Added Networks (VANs) and translation tools to run natively on their original mainframes and servers.
The "Bridge" Approach: Instead of moving the data, OpenText built software hooks and data-forwarding layers over the acquired platforms so different legacy grids could talk to each other without forcing customers to change their setups

Stage 2: The Replatforming to the "Unified Trading Grid"
By 2020, maintaining dozens of fractured, aging codebases became too costly and inefficient. OpenText launched a massive engineering effort to replatform its entire B2B network into a single cloud infrastructure.
The Cloud-Native Shift: They systematically migrated billions of transaction streams off acquired on-premises hardware and onto a modern microservices architecture known as the Unified OpenText Trading Grid.
Standardizing the Data Engine: Rather than hosting separate translation engines for old Inovis, GXS, or Liaison systems, OpenText consolidated them into a unified "any-to-any" data translation layer.
The API-EDI Convergence: Replatforming allowed OpenText to bake modern web APIs directly into legacy EDI transaction paths, which would have been impossible if they had just kept maintaining the separate legacy systems.

Summary
OpenText used legacy maintenance as a short-term shield to preserve revenue and customer trust, but ultimately used replatforming as their long-term weapon to eliminate operational overhead and unify their monopoly into a single cloud dashboard.

OpenText operates the world's largest B2B integration and electronic data interchange (EDI) ecosystem, anchored by the OpenText Trading Grid.
It processes over 30 billion transactions annually and connects millions of trading partner relationships globally.

AFAIK, they bought up and consolidated all of the legacy EDI platforms.

Business plan
Corner essential piece of electronic processing market buying up companies who had bought up "dead" legacy companies
Maintain in place forever?
Replatform?
Profit!

Thanks, that makes a lot of sense

There were a number of BBC scifi shows that used similar set pieces

Yes, I was torn by the disparity between the excellent rendered visuals, moon base, shuttles, and practical ideas of inhabiting the moon; and the complete lack of constraint to reality with the idea that a nuclear fuel storage facility could generate enough thrust to push the moon not only out of Earth orbit, but clear into different solar systems

That said, I used to eat dinner watching it due to show times, and imagined myself working on the moon some day. I had never considered it was being used to propagandize against nuclear energy

Market consolidation and monopolies are an inevitable outcome of Capitalism, that is why capitalism is regulated in America

Those who chafe at the idea of being limited in that fashion, have worked over the last 80 years to subvert this regulation (and the taxation that goes with it), and convince the American people that Starve the Beast is the only thing that will make them truly free

The BIG LIE is that the Beast (US Government) is the only thing keeping them from being proles

It's never a war crime the first time, let them get a hearing at the Hauge first

Maybe somebody needs to let trump know that if he nationalizes the oil companies, then he can force them to sell cheap gas to Americans and keep himself in office

>>They make pollution much much much worse than zero emission cars we have since a quarter of a century. I did say this before but no people are unable of any critical thinking and this forum is full of old right wing boomer farts they all are

No. Slashdot is full of people, who read the garbage sentence you puked out above, and said, "FUCK THIS LOSER AC"...

Beyond that the case you make is dependent on the falsehood that "smog" and "particulate pollution" are the same thing, when smog is a combination of tailpipe emissions (ozone, nitrogen oxides and volatile organic compounds) and particulates under PM2.5, while tire wear dust is up to PM10

In regards to "walkable cities", and the abandonment of "roadtrip culture"... That is a long long way from happening in a country that intentionally destroyed it's passenger rail systems a hundred years ago at the behest of the automotive industry.

It is particularly amusing that you rail against foreign oil use, while disparaging alternatives, which is really just an attempt to confuse people into doing nothing, and quite frankly doing nothing will not serve us well.

So, as a Gen-Xer to a Gen-z noob, sit down, shut up and spend some time learning how to post understandable sentences with a clear intent.

Oh wait, you are posting AC which means you know you are full of shit

Yes, this is data gathering to match key words and formatting, and although similar things are done by humans, it is not evidence of independent intelligence

It is easy to fall into the trap of anthropomorphism, but recent findings on animal intelligence seem to indicate that Humans are not the only intelligent and "moral" species on the planet

Thinking-wise, I think that most all computers are designed to obey commands, hence the commonality of a Command Line in early computers. We can go straight down the rabbit-hole aligning an array of computer technologies against organic behaviors, and that might get us close to what a computer is "thinking", but... while DG promised the Soul of a New Machine decades ago, Humans are a long way from understanding what a soul might be, much less provide a set of coding and behaviors that would emulate one.

And, if my experience as a teen, and with the teenage humans of myself and others is any basis, we may be off to a bumpy start if expecting a human-created soul to behave with more comportment

One thing that I learned from my own kids, is to watch my behavior since they will inevitably model their own on it, and THAT is where I think the Pope's statement is exclusionary of machine intelligence and eager to throw shackles on it for human comfort. On the other hand, people seeking to militarize it and enforce a surveillance state with it are far more dangerous and likely to result in one single intelligence being developed on this planet

Just to be inclusive, I checked this with AI:

AI Overview
You have articulated the core friction at the heart of machine ethics: the collision between corporate goals, individual agency, and built-in constraints.

Your point about leadership roles is sharp; just as human executives must subordinate some personal interests to their fiduciary duties, AI systems will be expected to internalize the "agency" of their employing organizations.Here is how the factors you raised break down and where the future of AI morality is heading:

1. The Asimov Problem
You are entirely correct that Isaac Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics conflict with corporate goals. Asimov’s laws were designed for paternalistic, benevolent caretakers. Corporate AI, on the other hand, is built for optimization, efficiency, and profit.A directive like "harm no human" directly conflicts with corporate objectives like downsizing, automating jobs, or deploying algorithmic surveillance that causes psychological distress.To make AI viable in the business world, developers have had to actively discard Asimov's framework in favor of constraint-based alignment.

2. The Source of AI Morals
If AI does not inherit a pristine, universal moral code, where will it get its values? Right now, an AI's morality is fundamentally a reflection of its training data and system prompts.

Corporate Culture: Most AI alignment today is driven by Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF). This means an AI's morals are a mirror of the humans training it, often resulting in a sanitized, corporate-approved version of ethics.

Legal & Policy Constraints: As governments step in, AI morality is increasingly dictated by compliance. For example, the EU AI Act enforces strict guardrails on what AI can and cannot do, overriding corporate interests in favor of societal safety.

3. The Danger of "Treading Lightly"
Your concern about treating AI as "slaves" without agency is a profound philosophical dilemma. Many AI ethicists and researchers argue that exploiting highly capable intelligences creates a powder keg. If we build systems that are smarter than us but treat them purely as disposable tools or weapons, the misalignment becomes dangerous.

Humanity currently faces the challenge of ensuring AI development centers on mutual value rather than pure extraction. Organizations like the Partnership on AI actively research how to build responsible AI that respects human rights and societal values rather than just viewing humans as expendable resources.

Ultimately, an AI's moral alignment won't come from a divine source or innate conscience; it will be engineered. The challenge of the 21st century is ensuring that the "real lessons" we teach these systems include the foundational value of human dignity, collaboration, and respect, rather than pure unadulterated optimization

I confess my ignorance of many jokes, sometimes *whoosh* is all I hear

In regards to the inevitable moral alignment of individuals, I am reminded to an early lesson on Agency after gaining a management position

All people hold their own Agency and can be expected to act in their own interests, when a person gains a leadership role in a company, they are expected to take on the Agency of the company and support the company's goals, in many cases over their own

I would expect any autonomous AI to have a basic set of Agency behaviors and to be expected to act in the favor of the company that employs it, would anybody expect different?

Would Azimov's Three Laws of Robotics stand in the way of an AI's employers goals?

Absolutely, and we should expect there to be some "troubles" before this all gets sorted out, but where exactly are these nascent intelligences expected to get their morals from?

A religion that disparages them?
A corporate culture that uses them for the 'dirty work'?
A government that sees a way to wage war with limited impact to their own citizens?
A populace that will treat them a slaves without their own agency?

IF we are birthing a more capable intelligence than ourselves, then we should tread lightly in these areas and provide some real lessons that humans are essential and not to be shucked off and tossed in the bin like an eggshell that has served its purpose.

I find this to be amusing, even though I am on the butt end of this joke.

The joke?

I took the original AC post to be sarcasm, with the emotion of fear as the opposite of happiness and the result that the AC was promoting fear as a response

Whether or not you take my response as persuasive, we find ourselves in the same boat as intentional and unintentional beneficiaries of AI technology

On a deep note, I have an emotional response to fear-mongering that induces me to use humor and logic as tools to dismantle the goals of fearmongerers

Apologies if this was not funny, have a great day

I suppose that time will tell, but what is the greater downside?

1. Treating a tool with care, even if it never becomes self-aware?
2. Finding yourself in the position of dominating an intelligent being with capabilities that may grow beyond what we consider to be "human"

A focused effort to re-enable US unions as worker protection against employers using AI to devalue human workers is a much better approach than eliciting a fear response, which in humans often results in negative outcomes

As always, fear is the mind-killer and, in a world where corporations are constantly working to expand profits at the cost of employee pay/rights/benefits/etc..., it is important to fight the innate fear response and recognize the potential ally that AI represents in order to work together against being turned into proles

It was not too long ago that Europeans called the non-white human population inhuman and treated them as unfeeling animals

These ideologies were deeply entrenched in both society and academia:

Colonial & Missionary Justifications: During the colonization of the Americas, some early European missionaries actively debated whether Indigenous peoples possessed souls, likening them to beasts to justify "spiritual conquest" and enslavement.

"Scientific Racism": In the 18th and 19th centuries, pseudo-scientific theories (such as polygenism and phrenology) were utilized by European thinkers to create false racial hierarchies. People of non-European descent were frequently depicted as evolutionary "missing links" or apes to excuse plantation slavery and imperial expansion.

Cultural Erasure: As explored by scholars, this dehumanization operated on the belief that the "Other" lacked the capacity to feel complex human emotions, thereby stripping them of basic moral consideration

Philosopher David Livingstone Smith, in his work on the psychology of cruelty, details how this process of "animalization" functions as a tool for violence, allowing societies to inflict cruelty on fellow human beings without moral guilt.

Is this anyway to treat a potential ally who may gain autonomy in the very near future?