Slashdot Mirror
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*
Given that the people most likely to participate in an open-source project are also users of the application being worked on, what would happen if the customers for a software product actually participated in its design and creation?
Umm, I for one would not want to pay a large corp. for the privilege of using software I helped to create, and watch the money go to them. Exactly what would I be paying for?
Perhaps I misunderstand, as this would work in a corporate environment, where staff helped out, but surely not for a commercial product?
I think open-source is great and all, but if your programmers are all coding away, and the code is released freely, revenue and profit is generated by service contracts and support, then a) how are your coders paid? Surely not the salaries and recognition of the present day. Will coding be reduced to a more mundane role? Lots of CS grads these days. Hell I don't even have to be a CS grad to throw something up on the net b) what about your competition? They will be able to put out a duplicate or improved product lickety-split.
-- By the way , these questions are not intended to address the morality of OSS ( I don't want to get into that), but the financial aspects, which are what will take down MS, as only a viable business solution ala IBM will be able to provide the infrastructure to maintain that sort of venture.--
mod away
The "open", standards-based web exists largely because Microsoft allows it to exist. With over 90% of desktops under their control, and over 90% of the browser market under its control, Microsoft could at any time move off to a "extended" web (an online service using proprietary protocols), and in fact, we see that already happening.
Recently Microsoft has begun shipping XP, IE6, a new Windows Media Player, and the client libs for .Net.
They have also begun to shun non-IE clients at their web sites.
Why they are doing this should be obvious - soon, MSN sites will start to accesss client code available only on MS platforms. This will truly allow MS to extend what they have embraced.
Of course, can you blame them? HTTP and HTML are useful protocols that have become outdated. The stateless, text-oriented model was extremely useful to get early adoption, but at this point there is no doubt that users of every type of platform are ready to move on to more advanced protocols that offer greater functionality. This is why many websites use SSL now as a way of creating a session of any kind. Unfortunately the HTTP-NG protocol has been shelved - it would have provided a great deal of new functionality that could have moved the web in to the next generation.
So Microsoft is going to get there on their own. You will soon see them exploiting the client libs shipped to 90% of the desktop users out there to radically enhance the browsing experience.
The standards-based web will soon be relegated to a second-class experience, and its our collective fault for not moving more rapidly to create open standards that provide for a better user experience, and get the tools out there to support them.
As long as Linux still requires knowledge of console commands (and not just any command-prompt commands, but Unix commands), it is going to be very hard for 90% of computer users out there to use Linux.
I don't think the mainstream is very interested in editing their operating system.