I see a lot more opposition to open-source software, and projects of non-commercial programming projects like decentralized peer-to-peer networks than I do support from big business.
In terms of support, the main means is by usage of open-source software. I have worked from very small companies to Fortune 100, and all IT departments I have seen make extensive use of open source programs, some more than others. Usage helps facilitate support of the software, and software suggestions and improvements, usually coming more from the workers at the company's initiative than from the directives of management. There is also some financial support of open source efforts from Red Hat, IBM and others, but it seems to me this pales in comparison to attacks on communal non-commerical efforts by the programming community by other elements of big business. In terms of attack, Microsoft has been lobbying government's to not use open source, to forbid government or government-funded universities from releasing open source code and the like. Microsoft OS Chief Jim Allchin had this to say: http://news.cnet.com/investor/news/newsitem/0-9900-1028-4825719-RHAT.html "Open source is an intellectual-property destroyer...I can't imagine something that could be worse than this for the software business and the intellectual-property business...I'm an American, I believe in the American Way, I worry if the government encourages open source, and I don't think we've done enough education of policy makers to understand the threat." SCO has launched a lawsuit against Linux, claiming Linux uses some propietary material of there's...which actually may be true, in the millions of lines of code submitted to them from all over it's certainly possible someone just ripped off some old code SCO has a copyright to. But people looking it over say it's very likely that SCO itself probably has unlicensed code within it's code base as well. Microsoft signed a big deal with SCO around the time of the lawsuit so lots of people see the lawsuit as a strike by Microsoft against Linux via a third party. "Open source" means that people can see the code that is compiled into a computer program. There are different types of open source licenses, the most progressive one is Richard Stallman's widely-used GPL, which is structured so that it would be very difficult legally for a company to "take over" a project based on the work of many person-hours of free work, e.g. it exists to protect the commons. One of free software's advocates, Eric Raymond, likened corporations building software to cathedrals, and communities of programmers creating software to bazaars. I think another effort in this realm, but not necessarily of open source, is the creation of decentralized, peer-to-peer networks. Software projects can be corporate, meaning they are made in a hierarchical, authoritarian, centralized environment for private profit, instead of in an egalitarian, free, decentralized environment for public benefit like free software. Information networks work in the same manner - you can have a network where people (clients) get their information, including text, pictures, audio and video from centralized servers owned by corporations like AOL Time-Warner, Disney, Sony, Viacom, News Corp. and so forth. These corporations spend money distributing this, and want to profit, so make their money either by advertisements or subscription. There is another manner of distributing such as peer-to-peer networks do - it is a decentralized network where everyone shares what they want from their computer, and a peer-to-peer network connects everything in an egalitarian manner (although faster nodes are often made to do more work by default, from each according to ability...), and anyone can search for and download whatever they want. This is being massively attacked by the RIAA (music corporation association) and MPAA (movie corporation association), in fact they just announced they're going to sue thousands of people doing this, and some Democratic representatives are pushing legislation that gives jail time to people who share copyrighted music. This attack has two effects - one, it enforces the copyrights on these works on the Internet whereas before they were being traded freely. John Gilmore in a very good paper called "What's wrong with copy protection" calls this "artifical scarcity". Secondly, it has the effect of hurting these networks for the distribution of non-copyright works. The decentralized network itself is attacked, whether people are sharing Britney Spears songs, or Noam Chomsky speeches (as I do on the Gnutella, Kazaa and WinMX networks). The lawsuit against Napster, and then Kazaa are early signals of this - these corporations don't want to go after the people trading their copyrighted material, they want these alternative distribution methods, for works under their copyright or not, shut down. It is a threat to them. Resources like Indymedia have already begun exploring peer-to-peer networks, and the technology for a more free, decentralized technology controlled by people rather than large corporations is possible, but it has come under attack by large corporations using the arm of the government while still in it's cradle. Lance
