Freedom To Be Free: Not To Exploit...

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It's astonishing how the attitudes of 'free-marketeers' change when genuine competition rears it's threatening head; falling back to a default position of civil [and oft-times criminal] litigation in order to protect their slice of the market and bury the competition at all costs. The bigger the company, the harsher and usually more successful the action. Apple is currently getting in a lather over OpenAI's in-progress hardware stream of business via its acquisition of io, the Jony Ive co-founded design studio. Apple claims that io has been nicking trade secrets and their intellectual property via former employee's 'remembered' and documented knowledge of Apple's hardware development. None of which has currently been shown to have a great deal of substance, and would seem to be based on normal levels of pre-emptive commercial paranoia. This attitude of course is not without precedent, many, many times over in the history of corporate capitalism.

I was reading only this afternoon a piece on Medium about the now infamous 'Halloween Documents' referring to Microsoft's attempts to stifle the commercial future of Open Source Software some thirty years ago, by to be frank, quite nefarious means; an attempt ultimately scuppered by a leaked, high-level internal Microsoft memo; accusations from which flowed that the company fought through the courts for some years at great benefit particularly to all the lawyers concerned, but ultimately to Microsoft's own cost. The lesson from that particular head-to-head confrontation was that not everything wholly-owned and proprietary is necessarily to the greater good: closed software unnecessarily held up the development of universally agreed web standards and accessibility for a quarter of a century.

What Microsoft didn't get then about software, it seems that Apple are not currently getting about hardware. There is great business to be made out of open-source soft-and-hardware and the sharing of knowledge and work that has already been done and proven in the field. As the OSS community has proven, open does not preclude private profit, but rather it actually enables it, whilst maintaining an equitable share of the action at the social level. It is the exemplar of a true mixed, participatory and egalitarian economy. The only reason big tech companies are still running scared of the idea is that they didn't think of it first. Ideas are ideas. Knowledge is knowledge. We all deserve equal and unfettered access to both...

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