SCO's McBride on his open letter to the Linux community (ComputerWorld)

Posted Sep 15, 2003 17:18 UTC (Mon) by gleef (guest, #1004) [Link]

The example I prefer to use are the lamplighters. During the 19th century, many cities had key city streets lit by gaslights. These gave light to the streets, which reduced crime and made it more comfortable to walk (or drive a carriage) at night. On the other hand, not only did they occasionally start fires, but they required the city to hire people to turn each of them on at dusk, and extinguish each of them later in the night. These men, called lamplighters, had a solid, steady job for a long time.

Starting in the 1880's, cities started to get decent power generators, which allowed them to replace the gaslights with incadescent electric ones. Large segments of city lighting could be handled by one guy flipping a switch at the power plant. Suddenly, the lamplighters were out of jobs.

Early on, many lamplighters were surprised that their career was suddenly gone, but some towns didn't make the switch until the 1920's. In some of these cases the delay was surely due to lamplighters lobbying against electric service, to save their already obsolete jobs.

If the lamplighters succeeded in preventing municipal power, just to save their own jobs, where would we be today?