Software "Open Monopoly" 284
garoush writes "The following article is at C|Net.news Software "open monopoly". In it "Sun developers Petr Hrebejk and Tim Boudreau say the economics of open-source software will break Microsoft's operating system hammerlock and replace it with a what they describe as an 'open monopoly.'"
I Personally have issues with such claims. With .NET, MS is positioning the company at "services" -- in effect MS is now gearing up to take on a new monopoly: "services" at the "consumer" level. If you agree, I don't see how "open monopoly" can break MS. After all, your average "Joe the consumer" doesn't know a thing about open source. " The submittor has an interesting point - but I think that even if John Q Public knows nothing about open source, if the services he uses are running open source, it doesn't matter.
Petr Hrebejk isn't an economist. (Score:2, Informative)
IIRC, in the case of, say, a TelCo considered to be a natural monopoly, the old-school supporting arguments centered around the idea that it's inefficient to have a redundant network of phone lines. The same notion was applied to utility companies. It's not clear at all to me that M$'s product development (and software development in general) is an analogous process (in terms of high infrastructure costs) to connecting phone lines or distributing electric power. To me, M$ is more of an old-school monopoly a la Standard Oil, that uses its market power to drive out competitors, even when they have arguably superior products.
If, by "open monopoly," Hrebejk means "everyone around the globe using open-source software for most of their computing" then I hope he's right, although that situation wouldn't be a true monopoly unless one company (Sun? Red Hat?) ends up controlling most of the software market.
-Rene