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

monopoly? how about co-operation?

[callinan]

I kind of dislike the phrase "open-source monopoly", and I don't believe that the total infastructure for the internet (or any other platform) will be totally open source. ALthough the use of OSS will continue to expand, I hope it can co-exist with commercial closed source also. I can't believe all companies will adopt OSS or just fall by the wayside.

This should not be called monopolly!

[bogado]

In the open source fields that are almost no monopoly, witch is good. Think about it, there's two or more for everything :

OS : BSD, LINUX, HURD?
DESKTOP: Gnome, KDE, Enlightenment
Browser: mozila, konqueror, lynkx?
Text Editor: vi, emacs
Office suite: Star Office, Koffice, gnome-office

If everyone turned into open source tomorrow we wouldn't end up in a monopoly, people would have choices.