Wednesday, February 6, 2008

Software Industry vs. Software Society: Who Wins in 2020? - Comment on an article by Micheal Tiemann

The article Software Industry vs. Software Society: Who Wins in 2020? by Micheal Tiemann brought me to think about innovations in technology in general. It seems that every time a new technology or an innovation in an existing technology appears, companies threatened by this new technology or innovation do all in their power to take control of the technology or try buy the patents of the technology. At this moment, either the new technology totally disappears from the market or is slowly integrated to the company's old technology, in exchange for a good amount of money. Since these companies have power and money, most independent small companies and technology developpers have difficulty staying in the market. We have all heard the rumors about inventions of different automobile engines using other products than gasoline and how the major gasoline companies have bought the patents to destroy them. Whether this is true or not is not really relevant, however, it seems that, as a general case, once big companies take part in a new technology, this technology either disappears, becomes available at a great cost or takes so much time to come out that it loses all its innovative appeal.
There are many reasons for this and Tiemann presents a few in his article. However, we must realize that it becomes necessary to encourage open-source if we want technology to innovate and if we want to encourage smaller companies to survive and continue to compete by creating new technology. It is often through small companies that innovations in technology has been created and this is why we must continue to encourage open-source softwares as a field of research for technology innovation.

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