The Coming "Open Monopoly"

Ramsed writes: "On cnet Petr Hrebejk and Tim Boudreau wrote an article claiming that the current Microsoft Monopoly will be replaced by an 'Open Monopoly'; a monopoly of Open Source. They are explaining why big companies like IBM support this. In their view, it's inevitable this 'Open Monopoly' will win in the end, and that apart from the current monopolist, everyone will be better of, because of lower barriers for participation, software better targeted at its users and lower development costs. Profit should be made with support and consultancy." Update: 10/28 13:42 GMT by J : Little-known fact -- for important stories, slashdot sometimes runs duplicates to see who's still awake on a weekend. Nice work to those of you who caught it. See you next week. *sigh*

Comments

Platform software

[Mr. NetBean]

Re the various comments "with an open source monopoly all the jobs would go away": Note that in our article, we were primarily thinking of and talking about platform software. There will always be a niche for software that performs specialized tasks (i.e. if I want a control program for my homemade veeblewhitzer that uses a propriertary protocol using parts of an EEG machine to monitor the my cat's water bowl via passenger pigeon, I'm going to have to either write it or pay someone because it's just not generally useful enough). I think we were clearer about the platform distinction in the original draft of the article than we ended up being in the final, shorter, draft. My bad.

For things that are useful to a broad spectrum of people, open source just makes sense. For some things it doesn't.

I posted a more detailed response to some of the issues brought up in the earlier conversation on Slashdot and this one here if anyone's interested.

(wow, slashdotted twice...I feel special :-)
-Tim Boudreau