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