Toolkit

Story: Australians told to ignore SCO's letters

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An operating system is quite obviously a basis for agreement. In practice it would not matter that much which operating system a business used so long as anyone that company communicated with digitally, by for instance buying software or sending documents through the internet, used the same system. Windows will continue to hold its dominant market position merely because it already has a dominant market position.

My opinion is that the facts that everyone will have to face in this issue is that the value of a popular operating system is created mainly by the people who choose to use that system and only marginally by the people that created the system. For example if a business or individual was to make the decision to leave Windows and apopt Linux would they be more concerned at foregoing the inbuilt features of windows such as its GUI or multitasking abilities or would they be more concerned at foregoing the capacity to use Windows based software that in many cases would not have been produced by Microsoft. Further if a business or group was to leave Microsoft Excel to use Lotus 123 would they be more concerned about losing the Excel graphics and programming features or would they be more concerned about diffuculties porting the spreadsheet data which was actually the product of their own efforts.

It seems to me that if my reasoning here is valid then court decisions to support SCOs intellectual property claims would be, given that the main value of an OS is generated by those people who choose to use the OS above that created by those who made the OS, more an example of condoning extortion rather than of justly rewarding intellectually contributions. Hopefully intellectually property laws will be understood in spirit and in future true innovators such as Linus Torvalds will be rewarded for their efforts rather than being punished by the power of essentially souless legal trickery.

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