“Losing proprietary rights can be significant because those rights are frequently essential for any company seeking profit from differentiated high-tech products. Changes in the GPL impose other limits on your ability to leverage a proprietary position when open source is involved”
“With incompatibilities increasing through changes in licensing practice, for-profit companies now have fair warning that they could be called on to answer in litigation accusations of restricting software freedom…The litigation pounds home the need to understand the incompatibilities between open source software and many business models…the litigation may be but a glancing blow for a few companies” (From SMART PILL by Edmund J. Walsh)
A “proprietary position” is the delusion is that if you shared your source code you would go out of business because other people would take your source code and use it in their (better or cheaper) product. In order to maintain that delusion you have to pretend that other companies already have exactly the same hardware in their product as you do and that your company could not make up for that “loss” by using other people’s source code too.
One of the most compelling illusions of the proprietary software delusion isn't that it protects ideas, but it protects investments put into developing ideas. When a software company spends millions coming up with the latest software algorithm, they need to recoup their losses. By maintaining proprietary software, it enables the company to maintain a monopoly on the price and the market for that new idea until they have made back their money. While this is great for the company, it is terrible for the consumer. If a proprietary idea is good but poorly implemented, the customer suffers because of low quality. If a proprietary idea is good but overpriced, the customer suffers because of price gouging. It really doesn’t take millions of dollars to develop new ideas anyway, as open source software has proved time and time again.
In order for a company in a proprietary position to stay in business, they need to sell you the same product over and over again, otherwise the market becomes saturated with their product and no one will need to buy their product anymore. They can effectively get you to buy their product over and over again by forcing you into a constant upgrade cycle. Many times these “upgrades” are nothing more than eye candy to make it look different, even though under the hood the changes are minimal or insignificant. This money-making ruse has gotten so out of hand in the software industry that many people refer to this like a disease called “feature-itus”.
Since a portion of a company’s infrastructure has to be allocated to maintaining and tracking upgrades and licenses, many times a company in a proprietary position is short on time and resources and this leads to the concept of Rapid Application Development or RAD. If you want to do something right, you have to take your time to do it right, therefore RAD actually means rushing a job to the point where not enough time is given to paying attention to all the little details needed to make it a smooth running and bug free product. This in turn leads to a part of the RAD model that is not discussed in textbooks, the Rapid Patch Development cycle. Instead of leading to greater efficiency and lower costs, RAD leads to bloatware and a massive and costly support overhead.
Therefore losing proprietary rights can benefit everyone. By accepting open source software, ideas can flourish and be refined and mature at a much faster rate than proprietary software can. By accepting open source software, you avoid the overwhelming hassle and expense of having to reinvent the wheel by developing your own software from scratch and/or paying site licenses for other company’s proprietary software. You will then be able to pass this cost savings on to the customer. This most certainly is incompatible with many business models whose only true goal is to nickel and dime you to death so they can post record profits to their stockholders, but what do we care? A glancing blow might be what they and we needed all along and they will certainly not be missed.
I used to work for a company, one of those kind of companies you hear about that went from rags to riches to rags again. Customers loved their product and sales skyrocketed. The focus of the company was to work for the customer and the bottom line was whether you were making a profit at it or not. Then a funny thing happened. They put themselves up on the Stock Market. Now the company was no longer working for the customer, they were working for the stock holders. Now the bottom line became how well the stocks were doing. It was as if the whole point of creating the company was so you could become good enough to put yourself up on the Stock Exchange. Now get this, sales were still skyrocketing, customers still loved the product, and there was no shortage of parts, yet the company had to start laying off droves of employees. Why was that? Because "the economy was doing poor due to the dot-com bust". Does that make any sense? Of course it doesn't, so how could they justify laying off employees when business was doing so well?
What happened was, the company had lots of its revenue invested into the stock market, so when stocks went down, their revenue went down with it. This is why the Stock Market reminds me of a nationalized casino, where people can go to place their bets on the company they think is going to do best, and hope for a winner. It's gambling, plain and simple. So if the Stock Market crashes, so does every major company in the United States, regardless if customers love their products, sales are skyrocketing, and there are no shortage of parts. Just like in real life gambling, Gambler's Ruin applies here too, so for someone to make money in the Stock Market, someone else has to lose money, so while there are big time winners, it is at the expense of lots and lots of losers.
The concept of an economy is simply the exchanging of products or services. This requires a marketplace so there can be buyers and sellers. Notice that it does not require a Stock Market. Now the greater the exchange rate between buyers and sellers, the more players can join in. Clearly if the exchange rate is too low, the economy will die out, and if the exchange rate is too high, the economy is in thermal runaway and therefore ultimately unstable. Economies left to themselves, establish a natural equilibrium. If you are like most people, all you want to do is have the bare necessities in life: adequate food, shelter, clothing, and some reasonably extra cash to enjoy life with. If you are a person with power and money, all you want is what is what all people with power and money want: more power and more money. In order to make that happen, a simple economy just won't do. We need ways to make it big time, things like legalized gambling, I mean Stock Markets, and an economy on steroids. To do that, they have to convince people to buy and sell more and more products and services. This allows more players where a privileged few can just skim off the top of the action. It requires that they encourage people to escalate their buying and selling sprees. Whatever you have isn't good enough anymore, you need something bigger and faster and newer. This is fine for the privileged few but such an economy is not built to last. Someday it will crash and burn, and the vast majority of people will suffer for it (like you and me for example).
To determine the value of goods or services is not an easy thing to do, but there is one rule that is often applied in this situation, called the rule of supply and demand. The rule goes like this: If supply is low and demand is high, raise your prices; If the supply is high and demand is low, lower your prices. That sounds fair, doesn't it? Think again! Look how incredibly expensive the cost of medical supplies and services have become recently. They justify the cost of their goods because electronic equipment is expensive or drugs are expensive to make, but like everything else electronic, prices have come way down and most drugs are very cheap to synthesize, the price markup being due to "continued research support", of which only Americans pay for. It is really all about artificial supply and demand. They can ask for whatever they want to, and you will pay it because you have nowhere else to go to get it, and they know it. I say this because I have seen many job advertisements for the medical and health professions that brag about high pay, pensions, and wonderful personal time off packages at a time when all other big companies are cutting back on their benefits. Sound suspicious? It does to me!
The concept of a government is that the more moral a people are, the less freedom restricting laws are needed to control them. With all these greedy CEOs and corrupt government officials, we unfortunately need lots of freedom restricting laws. We need government oversight and price control because no one else can do it. The Stock Market should be eliminated. If not for anything else, just simply because it will eliminate one more unnecessary thing that can go wrong and bring the entire economy down with it.
Leave it to politicians to invent new and innovative ways to help Big Business blindly rob the American public and disguise it as a "credit". Yes, I am talking about Carbon Credits! In case you don't know what Carbon Credits are, it works like this:
Carbon Credits are a limited quantity (as determined by the Kyoto protocol), artificial/imaginary resource placed on the Commodities Market. Companies buy and sell these Credits like Baseball Trading Cards. For example, F-Company buys 100 Carbon Credits at $100 a credit. F-Company will then raise the price of their products (or services) and justify this price hike to their customers by telling them that their product costs more due to the Carbon Credit "penality". Consumers/customers will then willingly accept this explanation because they blindly believe F-Company is doing what is right for the environment this way. But then along comes G-Company and offers to buy all 100 of F-Company's Carbon Credits at $200 a credit. F-Company agrees and walks away with $300,000 profit in their pocket. Wait a minute! Where did the $300,000 profit come from, when 100 Credits X ($200 selling price - $100 initial investment) = $100,000 profit? Well remember that the customers paid off that initial $100,000 investment that F-Company made, so F-Company spent $100,000 and then charged its customers $100,000, resulting in a net loss/gain of zero. That way, no matter what G-Company offers F-Company for its Carbon Credits, it will all be just pure profit. It is a win-win scenario for Big Business and a lose-lose scenario for us, the customers and the consumers.
If this all sounds strangely familar, well it is. The Commodities Market is a form of the Stock Market, complete with all the same pitfalls and dangers that come with that system as explained earlier. Worse yet, it can do nothing to curb CO2 emissions, because it doesn't matter how much Carbon Credits or money you have, neither credits nor money can absorb significant amounts of CO2. This ludicrous Carbon Credit system is the equivalent of robbing the poor to pay the rich. Big Business is looking for a sucker, and with Carbon Credits, they have found one and they thank you for that...all the way to the bank.