[extropy-chat] The Internet: a commie, socialist conspiracy!

[Jack Parkinson]

Some interesting observations and opinions from Slate magazine. In a world 
ruled by profit-focused business - the Internet could never have arisen...

Full story see: http://www.slate.com/id/2130798
Two short snips:

"This month, SAP's Shai Agassi referred to open-source software as 
"intellectual property socialism." In January, Bill Gates suggested that 
free-software developers are communists. A few years earlier, Microsoft CEO 
Steve Ballmer called the open-source operating system Linux "a cancer." 
Considering what these guys say in public, I wonder what dark words they 
utter in private-that al-Qaida uses open-source software to plot terrorist 
attacks?"

"The Web owes its existence to open source: Both the first text browser and 
the first graphical browser, Mosaic, were open-source projects. About 70 
percent of the world's Web servers run on Apache, which powers some 50 
million sites. If it weren't for free open-source software, companies like 
Amazon, Google, and Yahoo!-all of which run Linux-might never have got off 
the ground. Google, for example, uses an estimated 170,000 servers to power 
its search engines. If it used Microsoft Web server software-around $500 per 
computer in licensing fees-that would create an annual bill of about $85 
million. That wouldn't put a dent in Google's budget today, but Sergey Brin 
and Larry Page never would have been able to start their company if they had 
had to pay those kinds of fees up front."

Jack Parkinson