Dana Blankenhorn

Redistribution of Technology Wealth

The redistribution of technology’s wealth is indeed trickier than I thought. 

When I first began covering open source in 2005, Amazon.Com was worth $19.6 billion, Google had just passed $100 billion  and Facebook was a start-up.

The “incumbent” software companies of that time were IBM, which was worth $140 billion, Oracle at $63 billion, and Microsoft at $273 billion.

Open source was an underdog technology. Closed source or “proprietary” software was where the money was. You licensed software. The company that developed it accepted all the costs of growing and maintaining it. The cloud was barely a gleam in Larry Page’s eye, a headache made necessary by Google’s roaring success in search.

Google vs. Oracle: No Takesie Backsies

The world of open source software is based on one truth above all.

No takesie-backsies.

Once code goes open source it doesn’t go back. You can create a new version, create a new license around it, and sell that. But the old code remains free to see, free to fix, and free to change.

Oracle hates open source with a passion. Nothing else represents such an existential threat. Oracle’s business model is based on charging high and rising prices for its database software. If someone could create an alternative that was free, Oracle couldn’t exist.

So, Oracle took direct action. It bought Sun Microsystems, at the time a primary supporter of open source, in 2010 and closed its projects’ source code. The Sun Solaris operating system didn’t survive. The Open Office code base was eventually forked but isn’t a big factor in the market. The big get was Java, originally created as a “write once, run anywhere” environment but, by 2010, a primary language for servers.

Oracle closed the code by declaring the Application Program Interfaces (APIs), the instructions showing how the code worked, could be copyrighted. To Oracle, this now meant that any code whose creation relied on those APIs belonged to Oracle.

This is bullshit.

Redesign My City

The pandemic is both a tragedy and an opportunity.

A decade of business evolution was compressed into a single year, of necessity. Companies learned to deal with a remote workforce and found it good. So did the workers. Electronic commerce went from being a luxury to a necessity. New jobs were created in warehousing and delivery, while those in retailing and wholesaling disappeared.

Now that the pandemic is easing, we’re not going back. Companies that force people back into offices are going to find themselves at a disadvantage. The acceleration of cloud means many jobs are gone for good.

There are some who think this means we’ll all be living separate lives after this. I don’t think so. That’s not how things went after 1918. On the contrary, people became desperate for other people, for life, and for meaning. They didn’t call it the Roaring 20s for nothing.