Forbes (June 7, 2004)(subscription required), has an article "Kill Bill: IBM Takes on Microsoft." The piece is about the billions of dollars that IBM is putting into open source software, particularly Linux.

At PFF, we are acolytes of Schumpeter's view that the gales of creative destruction unleashed by capitalism constitute its greatest virtue -- a colleague calls it Schumpeter's Trumpet. In consequence, we view contests between corporate giants as sporting events. If IBM wants to bet that the way to go is to commoditize the operating system and sell services and hardware, while Microsoft and Sun think it better to make the software so robust that services are unnecessary -- well, folks, we've got a ball game going tonight.

But there is a deeper import to this news of IBM support. The Free Culture Movement holds up open source software as a model of production that can be replicated in other areas, ranging from books to music to pharmaceuticals. Indeed, in his recent and highly-praised (though not by me) book Free Culture, Larry Lessig pays tribute to Richard Stallman, the most anti-market of the founders of the open source movement, a man who believes that using proprietary software is immoral: "[A]s I reread Stallman's own work . . . I realize that all of the theoretical insights I develop here are insights Stallman described decades ago."

In my view, the idea that we can dispense with the market system for the production of creative products and rely instead on cooperatives funded via some unspecified other mechanism, perhaps a tax on hardware, is dangerous and demented. Others disagree with me -- that, too, is what makes ball games. But, I submit, if in reality the open source software movement is increasingly dependent on IBM, then the moral pretensions of the Free Culture Movement to be achieving something beyond the morality of the marketplace stand discredited. And this is important, because it allows us to see the contest for what it is -- an economic and business debate over the best way to produce the proper mix of software, hardware, and services, not the dawning of Cyberman, a new species devoid of greed and selfishness.

posted by James DeLong @ 8:21 AM | General

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