IP: Replies to DoJ's Joel Klein and breaking up Microsoft

[Dave Farber <farber () cis upenn edu>]

> Date: Thu, 18 May 2000 09:38:12 -0700
> Subject: Re: IP: Replies to DoJ's Joel Klein and breaking up Microsoft
> From: Chris Gulker <cg () gulker com>
> To: <farber () cis upenn edu>
>
> Dave-
>
> Weighing in on breaking up MS (from my column to appear in next Monday's
> Independent - London):
>
> ...
>
> Throughout history, people and institutions have been able to gain power by
> having exclusive access to information.  Nations call it sovereign rights or
> state secrets. Capitalists call it market advantage.
>
> For example, in the first millennium, the Catholic Church gained
> considerable advantage by encrypting almost all of the world¹s knowledge ­
> e.g., the Bible -­ and allowing only its high-level adherents access to the
> means to decrypt it, namely literacy in the Latin tongue...
>
> Microsoft¹s key advantage is its knowledge of the APIs ­ application
> programming interfaces ­ and the source code for the Windows operating
> system.  Microsoft¹s apps are better, sooner because their developers get a
> head start in knowing what those APIs look like...
>
> Rome¹s influence began to wane once the printing press made knowledge widely
> available in tongues other than Latin. People who were unhappy with
> Catholicism went out and created their own religions and attracted their own
> following.  Which is precisely what movements like Open Source and Linux are
> doing.
>
> The Catholic Church once banned secular versions of the Bible as a way of
> regaining control lost to the printing press, but it was too late. Microsoft
> recently tried to silence Slashdot and readers complaining about Microsoft¹s
> practices by using a law that it had lobbied heavily for, called the Digital
> Millennium Copyright Act.
>
> Too late, Microsoft.  It will daily get harder, in our networked world to
> succeed by keeping information out of people¹s hands.
>
> http://www.gulker.com/ra/microsoft.html