A link to the orginal article:

Posted Sep 12, 2006 13:59 UTC (Tue) by gravious (guest, #7662) [Link]

It has been plainly obvious to me, since the late nineties (at least) when I first started thinking about the intersection between software and ethics, that software piracy means a different thing to a Microsoft than it does to a Borland - say. A software company with a near monopoly in the market will preserve that market share in the face of piracy and will not lose money even though each pirated copy is theft. For a company like Borland though it matters a lot if you pirate their software because the lost revenue will not be recovered through any network effect because as being in second place to begin with they had to adhere to some standard whether it was Ansi C or Intel x86 assembly code instructions or whatever. Witness Netscape - a striking example, its browswer was even given away free! The comapny basically said, 'pirate this', and they still got their ass kicked (regardless of what Joel on Software says about re-engineering).

It appears to me that FOSS is the only way to to prevent strangulation. Software is too easy to copy and copy perfectly at that. A Microsoft has a fundamentally different kind of monopoly to say an AT&T or a Standard Oil or a De Beers (http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/198202/diamond) or a Government - well okay, governments are a different kind of monopoly again and the only ones that seem to be able to deal with really aggressive monopolists always assuming mr. goverment is independent and fair which he is not. So Microsoft has a fundamentally different type of monopoly.

Another interesting factoid is that every single _large_ software company has it's own OS (or more). Apple - Mac OS(n). IBM - PC DOS,OS/2,AIX. SGI - Irix. Microsoft - DOS,Windows (3x,9x,NT,CE),OS/2,Xbox...Novell - Netware, Novell DOS, SUSE. Sun - SUNOS,Solaris. HP - HP/UX. DEC - Digital Unix...SCO, AT&T, NEC, Atari, Commodore, the list goes on and on. The only exceptions to this rule seem to be Adobe, Autodesk, Symantec, Oracle and a number of others. But as you see, to be a truly large software you must have an OS you can call your own... But once Microsoft commands the OS space, this commanding threatens every single _other_ large software related company (granted Apple, Sun, IBM, SGI, NEC, HP all do hardware as well) in fact you can see that the companies that don't do hardware also don't have an OS except Microsoft until recently. Microsoft monopoly in the OS space kills the software arms of the large hardware/software behemoths and stifles innovation in the purely software space unless you are very specialised (digital/media, autocad, cam, big iron databases, security - more or less any space that is not general and that Microsoft has not gotten around to taking an interest in.

This leads me to believe that FOSS is the only non-governmental way (that is, legal measures) to move on from the dire situation we as innovators find ourselves in - though FOSS requires the legal system to work to its advantage. I predict, regardless of what this research paper finds, that Microsoft will get more and more into hardware and services, UNIX will get thrashed more and more by Linux* and there will be other GPL OSes that we are not aware of that will compete with both Microsoft and Linux but will not be UNIX based - RockBox springs to mind. Microsoft's dominance will come to be seen to be an aberration. There are too many curious and inventive and altruistic people in the world. When a research paper takes into account people's moral side when making decisions then it will serve as a viable model for forecasting.

Any thoughts on this?
Anthony

* when I say Linux - substitute your own favourite FOSS OS here :)