[vox] OS/2 and Linux, why has IBM changed?

[Joel Baumert]

[...]
> 
> In my opinion, MS' attempts to label open-source as "communist" was
> bizarre, but instructive of the relationship between power and the kind of
> arrogance contribute to the erosion of the foundations of democracy.

Heh... Doesn't community based development epitomize the Utopian 
idea of communism with the people owning the software and contributing
and taking according to their needs :-)?

MS does not understand Linux for a basic reason. They have a hard time
understanding why a highly skilled workforce will give their intellectual
property away for free. From their business standpoint they can see how
people can profit from that effort. I have never been to MS' campus, but
I expect that you will find that all of the long term engineers and 
management are thoroughly indoctrinated in the ideal that software 
intellectual property is an enduring, expensive, and hard to reproduce
entity. MS develops software where OSS evolves software. They are 
entirely different ways of looking at the world and I suspect they will 
never catch on because the cultural inertia will keep them locked into 
a narrow focus on why their product is good and why others software will 
never be the same quality or acceptance.

The steel industry through the same thing, so did the producers of 
mini-computers, mainframes, and other products that have been either
destroyed or moved into small niches by a disruptive new product that
changes the basic way that people look at a basket of products or 
services. OSS is not new, but it is reaching a critical mass at a 
difficult time for MS, just as this technology is not so 
coincidentally is getting wider acceptance.  

I think that anyone that examines the OSS movement, minus some of the
left wing wackos, will recognized that the ecosystem within the most
successful OSS projects have a very capitalistic motivation, reducing
the cost of doing business by sharing the development and maintenance
costs. It would be interesting to find out how many OSS developers are
paid to do their work... I would include students in the paid category
if they are using it as a platform to graduate :-) and I would include
those that are either getting paid in venture capital or speculating on
the next bubble in the paid category. I guess some of it is resume 
building and of coarse there is coding for the love of coding.  It
would be interesting to know how many core developers are paid for
their efforts.

Joel