[Gllug] An article for you from an Economist.com reader.

[Amias Channer]

On Fri, 18 Jun 2004 15:16:17 +0100
Richard Jones <rich at annexia.org> wrote:

> Most capitalist economies recognise (to a greater or lesser extent)
> that when a company achieves a monopoly, it's "game over" for
> competition.  Since it's competition that drives down prices and
> increases efficiencies, it's not in the interest of citizens to have a
> marketplace with reduced competition.  So they have laws to control
> monopolies.

Monopolies do drive down prices but that price is rarely passed on
to the consumer . Most of it goes in the directors and shareholders
pockets or in the worst cases to the election campaigns for the
politicians that help to redifine the monopoly as something less 
illegal.
Even monopolistic open source companies share their profits more
evenly , the developers own the kudos and gain employability through
their work , whereas a company can loose market share if it looses
certain programmers ( transmeta without linus ?) .
I think the sharing is the difference here.
 
> Now I'll grant you that sometimes these laws aren't effective, and
> sometimes they are undermined by self-interested politicians, but
> corrupt government is something we should all work against.

The easiest way to protect your monopoly is to have it enshrined in
legistlation by a politician who will do anything for campaign funds ,
of which there are far far too many.
The easiest way to fight a capitalist monopoly is put your money elsewhere.
The easiest way to fight an open-source monopoly is to fork the code.
The practise of both of these should show enough of the differences between
the two.

Toodle-pip
Amias
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