Don - Thanks for the thoughtful reply.
I really mischaracterized it when I said over and over that the big boys - MS in particular - haven't done anything for "me." What I really meant...seriously, I should have spent more time talking about what I believe is the hard-wired behavior of these mega-corporations. They behave like governments, but their only voters are the shareholders. Also, because of their size, relationships with governments (see all the news pieces about Google and MS and their relationships with China), and economic reach, it takes more than a nudge to influence them. It has been shown over and over again that the creative side of this stuff has nothing to do with size. These outfits become as big and over-reaching as they are in order to grab and hold market share; that is, to sell us lots and lots of stuff, and to make sure that it is more difficult for others to sell us lots and lots of stuff. I'm not trying to teach Econ 101 here - I'm just opining that it takes unified, concerted, hard-ball, POLITICAL action by huge numbers of people acting as a unit to budge these guys, kicking and screaming all the way. So IMO, we as a group or we as individual are much too teensy tiny to have much or any effect on the monsters. In this particular discussion I would say that outfits like MS, and to a lesser extent IBM (Dell too) are just glomming onto OSS, Linux in the server space especially, so they can sell us lots and lots of stuff while trying to prevent anyone else from doing so. That in and of itself isn't illegal or even evil, but it isn't really supportive of the "OSS movement" and it isn't particularly expending OSS's market share. They just figure that a certain percentage of the market will go with Linux, and it may as well be us (MS, IBM, Dell, HP) that sells it to them. It could be argued that these guys help corrupt OSS by marketing it the same way they market all their other stuff. Maybe they pull an Apple and couch it as some sort of "alternative" way of doing things, but in the end it seems to me that it really is just the same old marketers, marketing in the same old way, without much or any concern with elements of the market that aren't damn near as big as they are! I just think it is the nature of the beast to eat everything that it can reach and that in the end we are better off breaking these outfits up into politically manageable pieces so that there is real diversity in the marketplace, not just a couple of leviathans pretending to offer diversity or offering strictly on their own terms. Jesse Sinaiko Chicago, IL _______________________________________________ DIGITALDIVIDE mailing list DIGITALDIVIDE@mailman.edc.org http://mailman.edc.org/mailman/listinfo/digitaldivide To unsubscribe, send a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word UNSUBSCRIBE in the body of the message.
