Mike Corns, at Linux.com, writes . . .

“. . . if industrial-age companies used the current information-age manufacturing model, two competing companies producing, let's say, nuts & bolts (fasteners) would compete by using different threading standards rather than higher quality metals or machining precision.”

“. . . fortunately, it is no longer the usual situation in the industrial world – and so fixing a leaky pipe is no big deal. Unfortunately, it is the case in the high-tech software and hardware world. We accept inter vendor incompatibility and rapid obsolescence as the price of 'innovation'. In reality, it is often high-tech companies 'churning' the market to generate new revenue with mildly functionally different or improved technologies.”

“These technologies create upgrade requirements, impede customer switching because of a proliferation of proprietary extensions and deteriorate the cost effectiveness of end user solutions by making solution architectures and human skills rapidly obsolete. Fixing a 'leaky pipe' can be ridiculously expensive in the 'high-tech' business.”

“Open Source challenges this archaic situation. Not so much because it's free but, because of the potential for creating de facto, OPEN standards for core technology, like OS's, DBMS's, development tools and other central technologies which many of the biggest high-tech software company's revenues depend on today.”

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