“More importantly, once a CLOSED SOURCE company has become the dominant supplier (roughly, a monopoly) on a market segment, it is much easier to maintain both market share and high profit margins…”

From a business point of view it should probably be as difficult to become a major player on a new field using either closed source or open source. However, two things happen. With closed source, the binary application is the product itself, while with open source, the software is merely a tool for/component of the supplied product/service (as is the case with this site).

More importantly, once a company has become the dominant supplier (roughly, a monopoly) on a market segment, it is much easier to maintain both market share and high profit margins and thus the incentive to innovate diminishes or is even reversed (consider Internet Explorer after Netscape and before Firefox). This is because the inherently temporary technological monopoly it enjoyes as the result of its original innovation becomes a legal monopoly under IP law, while the cost of entering in a competition with an open source-based company is by definition low, as all their technological advances can be reused by anyone else.

Thus, open source companies find it easier to play catch-up, are more customer friendly, more challenging for their management and staff, but have a much harder time making into the billionaires’ club.

When it comes to innovation as such, think what would have happened should the wheel technology or the bread recipe been “closed source”. Or even what if the technology of mirror manufacturing were not “stolen” from the Venice companies (by hiring and smuggling out the engineers) by Louis XIV.

Historically, knowledge – including algorithms – was best developed by sharing advances either freely or through espionage/robbery. While sitting on knowledge has been very useful for some (e.g. mirrors, silk worms, IBM PCs) the eventual spread of these technological advance has proven more beneficial overall and has generated a lot of additional innovation. Actually the spread of knowledge, rather than the mere spread of genes has been the foundation for the quick pace of the human evolution.

So innovation is not something people in Open source go looking for it normally happens thew a set of small changes until one day it is like wow that great way better than anything else and so innovate someone had to be really innovative to create that. Sorry no. Could have been the collective mind of millions.

I’m happy that he can see it. I just hope it is not a mirage.

It is easy, just polish your Linux now. It is easy.